Stanley Elkin (1930–1995)
Autor/a de The Living End
Sobre l'autor
Stanley Elkin was an American Jewish novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was born on May 11, 1930. Elkin steadily and quietly worked his way into the higher ranks of contemporary American novelists. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, but grew up in Chicago and has spent most of his life mostra'n més since in the Midwest, receiving his Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois with a dissertation on William Faulkner. He was a member of the English faculty at Washington University in St. Louis from 1960 until his death, and battled multiple sclerosis for most of his adult life. Reviewers found Elkin's first novel, Boswell: A Modern Comedy (1964), the story of an uninhibited modern-day counterpart of the eighteenth-century biographer, hilarious and promising, while the stories in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1966) established Elkin as a writer capable of writing short stories of textbook-anthology quality. The ironically entitled A Bad Man (1967) is about a Jewish department store magnate who deliberately arranges to have himself convicted of several misdeeds so that he can experience the real world of a prison and carry on his own war with the warden in what takes on the dimensions of a burlesque existential allegory. The Dick Gibson Show (1971) uses the host of a radio talk show as a way of showing fancifully what it means to live "at sound barrier," and both Searchers and Seizures (1973) and The Living End (1979) are triptychs of related stories verging on surrealism. The Franchiser (1976), generally considered Elkin's best novel before George Mills, uses the story of a traveling salesman of franchises to show the flattening homogenization of American life. But as usual, what happens in this Elkin novel is less important than the way in which the story is told. Elkin won the National Book Critics Circle Award on two occasions: for George Mills in 1982 and for Mrs. Ted Bliss, his last novel, in 1995. The MacGuffin was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award for Fiction. Although he enjoyed high critical praise, his books never enjoyed popular success. Elkin died May 31, 1995 of a heart attack. His manuscripts and correspondence are archived in Olin Library at Washington University in St. Louis. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra'n menys
Crèdit de la imatge: Courtesy of Dalkey Archive Press
Obres de Stanley Elkin
The Muses Are Heard 1 exemplars
Elkin Stanley 1 exemplars
Il sangue degli Ashenden - Il condominio 1 exemplars
Obres associades
The Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, and Deeply Misunderstood… (2007) — Col·laborador — 87 exemplars
Fiction, Volume 1, Number 1 — Col·laborador — 1 exemplars
The Human Commitment - An Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction — Col·laborador — 1 exemplars
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Nom oficial
- Elkin, Stanley Lawrence
- Data de naixement
- 1930-05-11
- Data de defunció
- 1995-05-31
- Gènere
- male
- Nacionalitat
- USA
- Lloc de naixement
- New York, New York, USA
- Lloc de defunció
- St. Louis, Missouri, USA
- Llocs de residència
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
Brooklyn, New York, USA - Educació
- University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (BA & PhD in English)
- Professions
- novelist
short-story writer
professor (English)
essayist - Organitzacions
- American Academy of Arts and Letters ( [1982])
Washington University in St. Louis (Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters) - Premis i honors
- American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award (Literature, 1974)
National Book Critics Circle Award - Biografia breu
- Stanley Elkin was born in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in Chicago, where his parents moved when he was three years old. He began writing as a boy. He attended the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, earning a bachelor's degree in English in 1952, a master's degree in 1953 and a doctorate in 1961. In 1953, he married Joan Jacobson, with whom he had three children. He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957. In 1960, he joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis as an English instructor, and remained at the university the rest of his life. He rose to full professor in 1969 and was appointed Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in 1983. He became a famed teacher whose students were known to tremble in the wake of his comments. Stanley Elkin published his first novel "Boswell" in 1964 and his first collection of short stories, "Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers," in 1966. He became a prolific writer, producing 9 more novels, two volumes of novellas, two books of short stories, a collection of essays, radio plays, a screenplay, and numerous articles and stories for magazines such as Harper's, Playboy, and Esquire. His darkly comic and satiric writing style focused on American pop culture and the (often) painful side of human relationships. Elkin enjoyed critical acclaim and international popularity for many of his works. His extravagant, exuberant, and baroque language was widely admired. A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 1972 and two heart attacks did not stop Elkin's writing or teaching careers or keep him from taking travel assignments.
Membres
Ressenyes
Llistes
Premis
Potser també t'agrada
Autors associats
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 33
- També de
- 24
- Membres
- 2,346
- Popularitat
- #10,931
- Valoració
- 3.6
- Ressenyes
- 27
- ISBN
- 137
- Llengües
- 5
- Preferit
- 10
- Pedres de toc
- 64
the writing, however, was phenomenal; the sentences fun to read and the descriptions at times hilarious. I would recommend this book and I will look to see other novels from this author.
Lines:
Max had been the manager of Baltimore’s largest hardware store and had a guaranteed three-quarters point participation in net profits before his stroke in 1971 from which, thank God, he was now fully recovered except for a wide grin that was permanently fixed into his face like a brand...“I don’t dare go to funerals, they think I’m laughing,” Max said.
Dorothy was overcome with a feeling so powerful she gasped in astonishment and turned in her seat and looked in the back to see if her husband were sitting there. She was thrown into confusion. It was Ted’s scent, the haunted pheromones of cigarettes and sweat and loss, his over-two-year ownership collected, concentrated in the locked, unused automobile.
Women honored the men who put food on the table, who provided the table on which the food was put, and the men saved them. That was the trade-off. Men saved them. They took them out of awful places like Mrs. Dubow’s and put food on the table and kept all the books. Women owed it to them to be good-looking, they owed it to them that the shade of their dresses did not clash with the shade of their suits, to hold their shapes and do their level best to keep up their reflections in mirrors. It wasn’t vanity, it was duty.
And gathering up her metal detector, her trowel and shovel and hoe, and taking her fine paleontologist’s brush made off down the beach on her own, passing by groups of discrete populations—couples from the hotels stretched out on bathtowels; women older than Dorothy on beach chairs of bright woven plastic, indifferent as stylites, their skin dark as scabs; men, the ancient retired, chilly in suits and ties; girls in thong bathing suits, their teenage admirers trailing behind them like packs of wild dogs; kids, overexcited, wild in the surf, their parents frantically waving their arms like coaches in Little League; waiters, kitchen help, and housekeepers on smoke breaks; small clans of picnickers handing off contraband sandwiches, contraband beer; lovers kneading lotions and sunblock into one another’s flesh like a sort of sexual first aid.
if you both only managed to live long enough your worst enemy could become one of your best friends.… (més)