R. I. P. -- The Authors Thread

There's a "Ghost Recon" joke in there somewhere.

 

Loved his early stuff. Have been hate reading everything after "The Bear & The Dragon" just to see what happens.

 

Oscar Hijuelos dies at 62. won Pulitzer for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/b...an-writer-who-won-pulitzer-dies-at-62.html?hp

 

Colin Wilson, famous for his 1956 book "The Outsider," dies at 82

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/b...s-at-82.html?pagewanted=2&rref=obituaries&hpw

Ranging over the voracious reading in literature, science, philosophy, religion, biography and the arts that he had done since he was a boy, “The Outsider” had an aim no less ambitious than its scope: to delineate the meaning of human existence.

The book’s central thesis was that men of vision — among them, Mr. Wilson said, were Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Nietzsche, H. G. Wells, T. E. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Hemingway, Van Gogh, William Blake Nijinsky and the 19th-century mystic Ramakrishna — stood apart from society, repudiating it as banal and disaffecting.

“The Outsider is not a freak, but is only more sensitive than the average type of man,” Mr. Wilson wrote. He added: “The Outsider is primarily a critic, and if a critic feels deeply enough about what he is criticizing, he becomes a prophet.”...

Though “The Outsider” was often described as a philosophical work, Mr. Wilson saw it as fundamentally religious. Unlike existentialists whose worldview, he felt, inclined toward a dour nihilism, he purveyed what he called optimistic existentialism.

“Sartre’s feeling was that life is meaningless, that everything is pure chance, that life is a useless passion,” Mr. Wilson told The Toronto Star in 1998. “My basic feeling has always been the opposite, that mankind is on the verge of an evolutionary leap to a higher stage.”

Mr. Wilson argued that it was possible for mankind to achieve this exalted state through the kind of transcendent experience that comes, for instance, in the presence of great works of art. Such transcendence, he maintained, had been rendered largely inaccessible by the mundane grind of daily life.
...

Mr. Wilson’s disdain for the contemporary human condition, coupled with his almost preternatural confidence in his own abilities, also played well with the British news media — at least until the almost inevitable literary backlash set in...

“I suspect that I am probably the greatest writer of the 20th century,” he told The Guardian, the British newspaper, in 2006. “In 500 years’ time, they’ll say, ‘Wilson was a genius,’ because I’m a turning point in intellectual history.”
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I think it's sad when an author dies and that's the first time I've ever heard their name.

 

Was just thinking about the post of mine you quoted in the "what are you reading" thread: Kaplan was a great biographer. His Bartlett editing was interesting, too.

 

Joe McGinniss died. They say he wrote about politics, but maybe we know him better for The Miracle of Castel di Sangro.

 

Peter Mathiessen, all-round old school "man of letters" dies at 86

http://www.npr.org/2014/04/06/297154718/peter-matthiessen-co-founder-of-the-paris-review-dies-at-86

He is the only writer to ever win the National Book Award in the categories of Fiction (for Shadow Country) and General Nonfiction (for The Snow Leopard, which also won for Contemporary Thought). He was also a political activist, a Buddhist teacher, co-founder of The Paris Review and, briefly, a spy.

In his first nonfiction book, Matthiessen staked out the territory he would revisit the rest of his life — the destruction of nature and natural peoples at the hands of mankind. Wilderness in America,published in 1959, is a history of the extinction of animal and bird species in North America . ...

. . .

But he said he never intended to write nonfiction. "Fiction is my first love, and that's the way I began," he said. "And frankly, when I began nonfiction, I did it for money."

McKay Jenkins, the author of The Peter Matthiessen Reader and several nature books, says that's astonishing. "That's kind of like Babe Ruth wanting to be remembered as a pitcher," Jenkins says. "Matthiessen is held in such high regard as a nonfiction writer by nonfiction writers that they sometimes say, 'How is it possible that this guy can be such a virtuoso fiction writer, and give his equally substantial body of nonfiction work such short shrift?' Because all the rest of us are trying to do what we can to mimic his nonfiction work."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/b...hor-and-naturalist-is-dead-at-86.html?hp&_r=0

Zen Buddhism

His wife had already embraced Zen Buddhism in the late 1960s when Mr. Matthiessen followed suit, meditating cross-legged for hours on end and later becoming a Zen priest.

His spiritual hunger and the death of his wife from cancer in 1972 lay behind his decision to travel to Nepal in 1973. Ostensibly he went there to record a field trip with the biologist George Schaller. But the book it inspired, “The Snow Leopard,” also chronicled a spiritual journey and a pilgrimage of mourning shadowed by that rare animal, whose presence Mr. Matthiessen finally sensed even if he never actually caught sight of one. The book won the 1979 National Book Award for nonfiction.

He also reached outside himself to understand the struggles of the oppressed and neglected, an effort he traced to a lifelong “uneasiness about unearned privilege.” (At 15, he had rebelliously had his name dropped from the Social Register.)

Travels with Cesar Chavez, the champion of farm workers, led to the 1969 book “Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution,” referring to the barrio in San Jose, Calif., where Mr. Chavez had gotten his start as a union organizer.

Mr. Matthiessen went on to publish “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” (1983), a fulmination against the federal government’s treatment of Native Americans, centering on the prosecution and conviction of Leonard Peltier in the murder of two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in 1975 at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Mr. Matthiessen and the book’s publisher, Viking Press, were sued for libel damages in separate actions by an F.B.I. agent and a former South Dakota governor, causing Viking to withdraw the book. Both suits were eventually dismissed, but at a cost to the defendants of more than $2 million in legal fees.
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NPR ran an interview with him yesterday morning. I came in and thought it was his obit, but it left off talking about him in the present tense. Outstanding writer.

 

Yes, and I haven't tread enough of his work. I read The Snow Leopard twenty years ago, when I was too young to get as much out of the book as I should have. I recall, though, an arresting segment about he giving his ailing (on her death bed, actually) wife a bowl that he'd once bought for her in Switzerland; before their relationship (and her health) deteriorated, and they eventually decided to divorce. It's shockingly beautiful. I read the NYT piece yesterday, found my old, yellowed copy of the book, and noticed that, in 1993, I'd folded the page corner to mark the section of the book where he told that story.

 

Radu Florescu, Scholar Who Linked Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, Dies at 88 - N.Y. Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/b...e-impaler-dies-at-88.html?ref=obituaries&_r=0

 

I completely missed this. Cross-posted in the baseball thread... Pitcher/author Jim Brosnan, 84

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/sports/baseball/jim-brosnan-a-pitcher-with-the-cardinals-and-reds-brought-new-perspective-to-baseball-writing-dies-at-84.html?src=me

In 1959, Brosnan, who played nine years in the major leagues, kept a diary of his experience as a pitcher, first with the St. Louis Cardinals and later, after a trade, with the Cincinnati Reds. Published the next year as “The Long Season,” it was a new kind of sportswriting — candid, shrewd and highly literate, more interested in presenting the day-to-day lives and the actual personalities of the men who played the game than in maintaining the fiction of ballplayers as all-American heroes and role models.
...

“The first workout was scheduled for 10 o’clock,” Brosnan wrote, in a typically arch passage, about the first day of spring training. “The clubhouse was filled by 9, and we sat around for an hour, anxious to go. But first came the speeches. Spring training has a convocation ceremony that follows strict patterns all over the baseball world. Manager speaks: ‘Wanna welcome all you fellows; wanna impress on you that you each got a chance to make this ball club.’ (This hypocrisy is always greeted by an indulgent and silent snicker from the veterans of previous training camps.)”

The book created some resentment toward Brosnan within baseball. Joe Garagiola, the broadcaster and former player, called him “a kooky beatnik.” And in 1964, Brosnan, who had by then written a second book and contributed articles to magazines, was forced from the game because he would not sign a contract — he was then with the Chicago White Sox — that stipulated he could not publish any of his writing during the season. But perhaps more remarkable was the reaction to Brosnan outside baseball, where he was portrayed as something of an alien character: an athlete with a brain.

“Traditionally there are two kinds of baseball players — tobacco-chewing, monosyllabic hard rocks and freshly laundered heroes too young to appear in razor-blade commercials,” John Corry wrote in The New York Times, under the headline “No Comic Books for Brosnan.” “Jim Brosnan, a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, is in a third class. He wrote a book about the other two kinds.”​

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Great books, still worth reading esp. If you're a sports fan.

 

Walter Dean Myers passed away last week. Walter Dean Myers, prolific and beloved author of Award-Winning Children’s Books, who wrote more than 100 books for children of all ages. The most famous books are "Fallen angels", "Scorpions", "Invasion".

 

South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, 90...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/b...-apartheid-foe-dies-at-90.html?ref=obituaries

Three of Ms. Gordimer’s books were banned in her own country at some point during the apartheid era — 1948 to 1994 — starting with her second novel, “A World of Strangers,” published in 1958. It concerns a young British man, newly arrived in South Africa, who discovers two distinct social planes that he cannot bridge: one in the black townships, to which one group of friends is relegated; the other in the white world of privilege, enjoyed by a handful of others he knows.

. . . .

Ms. Gordimer was never detained or persecuted for her work, though there were always risks to writing openly about the ruling repressive regime. One reason may have been her ability to give voice to perspectives far from her own, like those of colonial nationalists who had created and thrived on the system of institutionalized oppression that was named the “grand apartheid” (from the Afrikaans word for “apartness”) when it became law.

Her ability to slip inside a life completely different from her own took her beyond the borders of white and black to explore other cultures under the boot of apartheid. In the 1983 short story “A Chip of Glass Ruby,” she entered an Indian Muslim household, and in the novel “My Son’s Story” (1990), she wrote of a mixed-race character. She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for “The Conservationist,” which had a white male protagonist.

Long before the struggle against apartheid was won, some of her books looked ahead to its overthrow and a painful national rebirth. In “July’s People” (1981), a violent war for equality has come to the white suburbs, driving out the ruling minority. In a reversal of roles, July, a black servant, brings his employers, a white family, to the black township of Soweto, where he can protect them. In “A Sport of Nature” (1987), the white wife of an assassinated black leader becomes, with a new husband, the triumphant first lady of a country rising from the rubble of the old order.

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She, too, mattered way more than most individuals.

 

Thomas Berger, author of Little Big Man and other works, 89.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/b...=click&contentCollection=Books&pgtype=article

Mr. Berger fell into that category of novelists whose work is admired by critics, devoured by devoted readers and even assigned in modern American literature classes but who owe much of their popularity to Hollywood. “Little Big Man,” published in 1964, is widely known for Arthur Penn’s film adaptation, released in 1970, starring Dustin Hoffman as the protagonist, Jack Crabb.

The novel, told in Crabb’s voice at the age of 111, recounts his life on the Great Plains as an adopted Cheyenne and makes the claim that he was the only white survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But Mr. Berger’s body of work was far broader than that, and it earned him a reputation as an American original, if an underrecognized one. The author and scholar Thomas R. Edwards, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1980, called him “one of our most intelligent, witty and independent-minded writers.” “Our failure to read and discuss him,” Mr. Edwards added, “is a national disgrace.”

....

Historical fiction was just one genre that the restless Mr. Berger embraced. He took on the horror novel in “Killing Time” (1967) and the pulp detective story in “Who Is Teddy Villanova?” (1977). He ventured into science fiction (and Middle American sexual fantasy) with “Adventures of the Artificial Woman” (2004); utopian fiction with “Regiment of Women” (1973), in which men have surrendered their grip on the world; and the survival saga in “Robert Crews” (1994), an updating of “Robinson Crusoe.” He revisited the western, and his best-known character, in “The Return of Little Big Man” (1999).

....

If Mr. Berger had a literary mission, it was to mine the anarchic paranoia that he found underlying American middle-class life. “Sneaky People,” from 1975, chronicles three hectic days in the life of a used-car salesman, a “family man” who keeps a mistress and hires a car washer to kill his phlegmatic wife. “Neighbors” (1980) records a nightmarish day in suburbia that parodies the rituals of neighborliness, among them competitiveness, bonhomie (false and otherwise) and a striving for civility in the face of a creeping conviction that the people across the street are barbarians. (“Neighbors” was made into a 1981 movie starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, one of four film adaptations of Berger books.)

In these and other novels — “The Houseguest” (1988), “Meeting Evil” (1992), “Suspects” (1996) and “Best Friends” (2003) — everyday social encounters quickly disintegrate into Kafkaesque comic horrors.​

 

Biographer Penelope Nevin, 75.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/a...-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

She won't go down in literary history as one of the great biographers, but she came to writing relatively late in life, did not have a wide range of credentials or connections, but wrote three interesting and readable biographies of interesting American artists, the first of which was by my fellow Galesburg, IL native, Carl Sandburg.

Ms. Niven followed the Sandburg book with biographies of two other fading luminaries of the Depression and World War II generation — Thornton Wilder, the novelist-playwright who created the perennial American stage favorites “Our Town” and “The Skin of Our Teeth;” and Edward Steichen, the photographer also known as curator of a traveling photo exhibition, “The Family of Man,” that drew millions to its message of universal human kinship during a postwar world tour.

Her subjects shared certain qualities: Each had a fundamentally optimistic view of life; all had been embraced by the public and dismissed, to a greater or lesser extent, by critics for their supposed sentimentality and Reader’s Digest-accessibility.

Ms. Niven brought a spirited defense to the reputation of each, and was praised for illuminating their stories with details from personal documents and unpublished works.

In later years, Ms. Niven told friends that she had always considered herself a writer but had never found her subject or the time — as a teacher and a mother and wife who moved her household across the country several times in the course of her husband’s career — before she almost stumbled into her work as a late-blooming biographer of the nearly lost voices of an era.​

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Galway Kinnell, a longtime favorite poet:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/30/b...n-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

I wouldn't say that, for me, any particular volume stands out. But some of his poems stop me in my tracks each and every time I read them, year after year. Pulling a Nail, for example, from the collection Strong is the Hold, is about as good a poem about fathers and sons and mortality that I know (and if doesn't remind you of Seamus Heaney, it should):

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Pulling+a+Nail.-a0151705087

Similarly, I've always loved Goodbye, where he references his dying mother and hints at his own mortality.

http://www.metafilter.com/144014/Goodbye

R.I.P.

 

Saw him "read" when I was in college, and again maybe 15 years ago. "Read" is in quotation marks because he had nearly all his poems (and others that he recited) committed to memory. Really great event: he read his poems & those of contemporaries like Richard Hugo and James Wright as well as a chunk by Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh. He ended the last reading I saw with three of Keats' odes... Because he found out ten minutes before the reading that one of the classes there for extra credit was studying them that week.

 

Another poet passes on who popped up in a "contemporary poetry class" I took in college: Mark Strand, 80

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/n...column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

His career took off when the celebrated poetry editor Harry Ford accepted his second volume of poems, “Reasons for Moving,” at Athenaeum, which went on to publish the collections “Darker” (1970), “The Story of Our Lives” (1973) and “The Late Hour” (1978). To critics who complained that his poems, with their emphasis on death, despair and dissolution, were too dark, he replied, “I find them evenly lit.”

Interviewed in The Paris Review by the actor Wallace Shawn in 1998, Mr. Strand described his poetic territory as “the self, the edge of the self, and the edge of the world,” what he called “that shadow land between self and reality.” The severe economies of his early work, however, led to frustration and its “bleak landscape” came to feel repetitive.

“I felt I had to sort of breakthrough that limitation,” he said. “And so you have, in my long poem ‘Dark Harbor,’ many other things cropping up. You have Marsyas and the Mafia, the muzhiks being slaughtered, Russian women at a dinner party.”...​

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Those limitations are there to be sure, but I still use his "Eating Poetry" in my introductory lit classes...

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

 

Thank you for quoting that in full. I loved reading it... smiling ear to ear.