Harold Brodkey, by Howard Coale for
The New Yorker, 1995
Harold Brodkey, born Aaron Roy Weintraub (October 25, 1930 – January 26, 1996) was an American author.
Brodkey was born in Staunton, Illinois and raised in University City, Missouri outside St. Louis. After graduating from Harvard University in 1952, Brodkey began his writing career by contributing short stories to The New Yorker and other magazines. His stories have won him two first-place O. Henry Awards. In 1993 Brodkey announced in The New Yorker that he had contracted AIDS. He later wrote This Wild Darkness about his battle with the disease. At the time of his death in 1996, he was living in New York City with his wife, novelist Ellen Brodkey (née Ellen Schwamm).
Brodkey is most famous for his long-awaited novel A Party of Animals, which was eventually published (perhaps only in part) as The Runaway Soul (1991).
Literary career
Brodkey's career began quite promisingly with the short story collection First Love and Other Sorrows, which received widespread critical praise at the time of its 1958 publication.
Soon thereafter, in 1964, Brodkey signed a book contract with Random House for his first novel, titled A Party of Animals (it was also referred to as The Animal Corner). The unfinished novel was subsequently resold to Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1970, and later to Knopf in 1979.
During this period, Brodkey published a number of stories, most of them in the New Yorker, that dealt with a set of recurring characters -- the evidently autobiographical Wiley Silenowicz and his adoptive family -- and which were announced as fragments of the novel. His editor at Knopf, Gordon Lish, called the novel in progress "the one necessary American narrative work of this century."[Newsweek, November 18, 1991.] Literary critic Harold Bloom declared "If he's ever able to solve his publishing problems, he'll be seen as one of the great writers of his day."[Time magazine, November 25, 1991.]
In addition to publishing at the New Yorker,, Brodkey earned a living during this period by writing television pilot scripts for NBC, and teaching at Cornell University.
Three long stories from A Party of Animals were collected in Women and Angels (1985), and a larger number (including those three) in 1988's Stories in an Almost Classical Mode. Evidently Brodkey had decided to omit them from the novel, for when in 1991 he published The Runaway Soul, a very long (835-page) novel dramatizing Wiley's early life, no material from Stories in an Almost Classical Mode was included. The novel seems to be either A Party of Animals under a new title or the first volume of an eventual multi-volume work. Brodkey made some comments that suggested the latter, but no further material was published in his lifetime, or has been since.
Bibliography
Short story collections
Novels
Non-fiction
Miscellanea
External links
- Jonathan Baskin, "Fading Fast," Bookforum [1]
