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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

Stanley Lawrence Elkin


(born May 11, 1930, New York, N.Y., U.S. — died May 31, 1995, St. Louis, Mo.) U.S. writer. He grew up in Chicago; from 1960 he taught writing at Washington University. His works explore contemporary life with tragicomic wit and imaginative insight. Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1966) was an acclaimed collection of short stories on Jewish themes. The novel The Franchiser (1976) tells of Ben Flesh, who, like Elkin, suffered from multiple sclerosis, which is for Flesh both an enlightenment and a burden. The Living End (1979) consists of three interwoven novellas.

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Columbia Encyclopedia: Elkin, Stanley,
1930–95, American writer, b. New York City. An offbeat fiction writer, Elkin had a gift for black comedy, fantastic imagery, bizarre situations, and a kind of lyrical bleakness, all expressed in ornately wrought language. He was essentially a moralist, and his works reveal a deep underlying seriousness. His novels include Boswell: A Modern Comedy (1964), The Franchiser (1976), George Mills (1982), The Magic Kingdom (1985), and Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995). His short stories, notably Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1966), and novellas, such as Searches and Seizures (1973), won critical acclaim. Also an essayist (e.g., the 1992 collection Pieces of Soup), Elkin taught writing (1960–95) at Washington Univ. in St. Louis.
 
Works: Works by Stanley Elkin
(1930-1995)

1964Boswell: A Modern Comedy. Elkin's first novel, recounting the misadventures of a man parasitically living off celebrities, is greeted enthusiastically as evidence of a new major fictional talent. Born in New York City and raised in Chicago, Elkin became an English professor at Washington University in 1960.
1966Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers. Elkin's first story collection shows a darker side to his imagination, presenting a series of stories that reflect the fragility of life and the human capacity for suffering.
1967A Bad Man. A department-store owner willingly goes to prison in this novel exploring the protagonist's search for existential authenticity through suffering.
1971The Dick Gibson Show. Elkin chronicles the comic adventures of a radio personality. Reviewer Joseph McElroy declares it "a funny, melancholy, frightening, scabrous, absolutely American compendium that may turn out to be our classic about radio."
1973Searches and Seizures. Elkin's short fiction collection combines three novellas, including an undisputed masterwork, "The Bailbondsman." Reviewer Thomas R. Edward observes that "No American novelist tells us more about where we are and what we're doing to ourselves".
1976The Franchiser. Elkin's comic novel about a traveling businessman who lives to acquire franchises and is stricken with multiple sclerosis solidifies the writer's reputation as one of the leading contemporary chroniclers of American life.
1979The Living End. Elkin's fantasy triptych connects three versions of the afterlife. Elkin's greatest commercial success as well as his most controversial work, it unsettles many readers' beliefs about God, heaven, and hell.
1982George Mills. A working-class man feels he has been betrayed by God. Elkin achieves impressive effects by treating his humble subjects with considerable wit and energy.
1986Stanley Elkin's The Magic Kingdom. Elkin's darkly humorous novel explores human perseverance in the face of an absurd universe. Eddy Bale, having lost his own son to a terminal illness, takes a group of dying children to Disney World.
1987The Rabbi of Lud. This novel about a New Jersey rabbi reflects Elkin's characteristic obsession with mortality. Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn is beset with problems with his family and his spiritual vocation. In a typical Elkin move, Goldkorn travels to Alaska and becomes the rabbi of the Alaskan pipeline. Critics admire Elkin's unblinking portrayal of rather grim material, which he is able to energize and even make endearing.
1991The MacGuffin. Elkin's novel explores the consciousness of Robert Druff, the commissioner of streets in a Midwestern city. Paranoid, self-pitying, and prone to criminal activity, Druff reveals an extraordinary imagination, which Elkin comically details by following him through a few typical days of his life. Critics admire not only Elkin's verbal dexterity but his sharp report of life on the street.
1992Pieces of Soap. This collection of thirty essays by one of the most highly regarded contemporary novelists reveals his eccentric and eclectic interest in American culture--from a piece on the world's largest purveyor of whoopee cushions and joy buzzers ("Recherche du Whoopee Cushion") to his report on attending a party for Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
1993Van Gogh's Room at Arles. The book contains three comic novellas: the title work, about a community-college professor's dealing with Vincent van Gogh's bedroom; Her Sense of Timing, about a wheelchair-bound professor whose wife leaves him; and Town Crier Exclusive..., which comically attacks the tabloid press and the fascination with British royalty.
1995Mrs. Ted Bliss. Elkin's final novel, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, presents his finest female portrait, the sweet-natured eighty-year-old Dorothy Bliss, a widow living in a Miami retirement community. Her sale of the family car tests her resourcefulness and humanity.

 
Wikipedia: Stanley Elkin
Stanley Elkin

Born: May 11, 1930
Brooklyn, New York
Died: May 31, 1995
St. Louis, Missouri
Occupation: Novelist, professor
Nationality: American
Writing period: 1950-1995
Debut works: Boswell: A Modern Comedy
Influences: William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Saul Bellow, John Barth
Influenced: Sam Lipsyte, Rick Moody, Tim O'Brien

Stanley Elkin (May 11, 1930 - May 31, 1995) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships.

Biography

Elkin was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Chicago from age three onwards. He did both his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, receiving a bachelor's degree in English in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1961 for his dissertation on William Faulkner. (During this period he was drafted and served in the U.S. Army from 1955-57.) In 1953 Elkin married Joan Marion Jacobson. 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.

During his career, Elkin published ten novels, two volumes of novellas, two books of short stories, a collection of essays, and one (unproduced) screenplay. Elkin's work revolves about American pop culture, which it portrays in innumerable darkly comic variations. Characters take full precedence over plot. His language throughout is extravagant and exuberant, baroque and magnificently flowery, taking fantastic flight from his characters' endless patter. "He was like a jazz artist who would go off on riffs," said William Gass. The novels are at once both highly artistic and immensely entertaining, though at times their essential sadness becomes almost unbearable. In a review of George Mills, Ralph B. Sipper wrote, "Elkin's trademark is to tightrope his way from comedy to tragedy with hardly a slip." About the influence of ethnicity on his work he said he admired most "the writers who are stylists, Jewish or not. Bellow is a stylist, and he is Jewish. William Gass is a stylist, and he is not Jewish. What I go for in my work is language."

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. However, although he enjoyed high critical praise, his books have 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.

He has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Works

Novels

  • Boswell: A Modern Comedy (1964)
  • A Bad Man (1967)
  • The Dick Gibson Show (1971)
  • The Franchiser (1976)
  • The Living End (1979)
  • George Mills (1982)
  • The Magic Kingdom (1985)
  • The Rabbi of Lud (1987)
  • The MacGuffin (1991)
  • Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995)

Story collections

  • Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1966)
  • Early Elkin (1985)

Novella collections

  • Searches and Seizures (1973) (U.K. title: Eligible Men (1974))
  • Van Gogh's Room at Arles (1992)

Other works

  • "A Prayer for Losers", from the Why Work Series (edited by Gordon Lish) (1966)
  • Stanley Elkin's Greatest Hits (anthology; Foreword by Robert Coover) (1980)
  • The Six-Year-Old Man (screenplay) (1987)
  • Pieces of Soap (collected essays) (1992)

Limited editions

  • The First George Mills (Part One of George Mills; 376 copies, all signed by Elkin and the illustrator, Jane E. Hughes) (1980)
  • Why I Live Where I Live (essay; 30 unnumbered copies) (1983)
  • The Coffee Room (radio play; 95 copies, all signed by Elkin and the illustrator, Michael McCurdy) (1987)

Audio

  • "A Poetics for Bullies", read by Jackson Beck, with comments by Elkin, in New Sounds in American Fiction, Program 10. (edited by Gordon Lish) (1969)

As editor

External links


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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Stanley Elkin".  Read more

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