Christopher Carduff on the “everyday sublime” of John Updike’s short stories

A contributing editor at The Library of America since 2006, Christopher Carduff is also the estate-appointed editor of John Updike’s posthumous publications. He recently spoke with us about the two-volume set of Updike’s Collected Stories that he prepared for the LOA.

Updike’s achievement is various and extensive, ranging from twenty-odd novels to collections of poems, memoirs, criticism, and more. To what extent do you think his future literary reputation will rest on the 186 short stories collected here?
 
To a large extent, actually—and in two distinct ways. First, considered as a whole, the stories can be seen as an endlessly inventive, ongoing exploration of the possibilities of the form over five decades—perhaps the richest body of stories by any North American writer of his generation, a cohort that includes Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro. Second, and more important, when the stories are considered individually, perhaps a dozen or so will eventually become known as masterpieces, among the best short stories ever written by an American. “Pigeon Feathers,” “Packed Dirt,” “The Gun Shop,” “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” “The Cats”: these are among the handful of stories that tomorrow’s readers will perhaps come to see as the concentrated essence of “Updike”—in much the same way that we now see “Bartleby” and “Daisy Miller” and “The Bear” as the concentrated essences of Melville and James and Faulkner.

How do the stories relate to the novels, particularly the Rabbit novels?
 
As Updike said in his introduction to the collected Rabbit novels, Rabbit was his ticket to the America all around him—his ticket to a discussion and dramatization of all the sweeping social forces of the postwar world, from the sexual revolution circa 1960, to the political and social upheavals circa 1970, to the events of the Carter, Reagan, Clinton years. The Rabbit saga constituted Updike’s contribution to “public fiction,” a running report on the state of the nation from 1960 to 1990 as reported through the passing thoughts and thoughtless actions of a wholly invented American Everyman.

The short stories, on the other hand, are almost always “private” in their nature and effects. They are autobiographical and domestic, dealing on the most intimate level with such matters as being a son, a husband, a father, a lover, a churchgoer, a citizen, an artist. And almost all of them, whether told in the first or third person, feature a narrator or protagonist who is an Updike stand-in, who shares Updike’s own experience of what it is to be an educated white middle-class Protestant male of his particular small-town background and his particular historical moment. It is these autobiographical short stories—the ones that deal not with “public” issues but with the miracle of existence, with the inner life and the dogged pursuit of one’s own self and soul—that I think of as his signature achievement.

You’ve arranged the stories not as Updike did in his own collections, but rather in the order of their composition.
 
That’s right. Now, for the first time, they can be read in the order in which they came out of Updike’s typewriter and were submitted to The New Yorker. Whenever Updike sent a story to the magazine—he had a first-refusal contract with The New Yorker at the age of twenty-two—he marked the date of submission on the first page of his copy of the typescript. Updike deemed this the date of composition, regardless of subsequent revisions, and I’ve followed his practice here. Almost all his typescripts are in the collection of the Houghton Library at Harvard; those that are not, I have dated by circumstantial evidence, usually correspondence with his New Yorker editors. The texts reprinted here are those of Updike’s last revision, and some of them incorporate changes he made in the copies of the first editions kept in his office library.
 
What’s the chronological span of the collection?
 
The earliest story here is “Ace in the Hole,” written in 1953, when Updike was a twenty-one-year-old Harvard senior. It concerns a reckless Rabbit-like young man who cannot make the transition from high school basketball star to responsible husband and father. The last one, “The Full Glass,” was written half a century later, in 2008, shortly before Updike’s seventy-sixth birthday. It is a self-consciously valedictory story, in which the Updike stand-in’s nightly ritual of pills and water becomes a kind of secular communion with the universe, “a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.” Early and late, all the stories aim, in Updike’s famous phrase, to “give the mundane its beautiful due.”
 
Are any stories omitted from this Library of America set?
 
Apart from a few things published in The Harvard Lampoon—juvenilia that have no place in his canon proper—the most obvious omissions are the eighteen stories concerning the recurring characters Richard and Joan Maple and the twenty stories chronicling the life of the Jewish American novelist Henry Bech. These, as Updike wrote, “do gain from being grouped,” and will be grouped in a later Library of America volume, together with the ten essay-stories of the 1970s known collectively as “Interviews with Insufficiently Famous Americans.” Included here, however, are “Snowing in Greenwich Village” (1956), the first Maples story, and “The Bulgarian Poetess” (1964), the first of the Bechs, on the (perhaps) shaky ground that when Updike wrote each of these stand-alone stories, he didn’t know he was beginning a short story cycle.

Do you think Updike has been an influential stylist? Do you detect the influence of his short stories on writers working now?

The lush, descriptive, pensive “Updike style”—the “everyday sublime” that characterizes the autobiographical short stories—is justly celebrated but only seldom imitated. In his novels Nicholson Baker proves to be both the truest and the most unabashed of Updike’s direct disciples: he “toasts the visible world” with a glass filled to overflowing, then out-toasts and out-drinks Updike to dazzling and intentionally hilarious effect. Among today’s short story writers, Roxana Robinson and Antonya Nelson have confessed to being under the spell of Updike’s fiction, especially in their lyrical evocations of family life. And Paul Harding, in the sentences that make up Tinkers and Enon, seems very much the Updike protégé in his precision of diction, his aching nostalgia, and the very cadences of his thought. All of these writers, I think, would admit to sharing Updike’s belief that describing God’s creation with fidelity is a devout act of praise.

Do you have a favorite Updike story?

I have a dozen of them, but if I had to choose just one, it would be one of the earliest, “The Happiest I’ve Been,” written in 1958, when Updike was twenty-six. It is the perfect evocation of the moment that comes to most Americans somewhere around the age of twenty—the moment when, after a couple of years of college or service or whatever, you return home to find that “home” is no longer yours, it’s become your parents’ house and you are, for the moment at least, homeless. And that your life is no longer among the people there—your parents and grandparents and high school classmates—and it really isn’t in the present either. Instead it’s a kind of a star on the horizon, portending God only knows what, but that you are excited to follow. It’s the story in which Updike comes into his full powers as a storyteller, and delivers a virtuoso verbal performance—and creates a unique emotional atmosphere and pattern of events and imagery—that can only be described as, well, Updikean.

The Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20): Missed Opportunity

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, professor of history, Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series was published earlier this year.

In June 1863 the Union Army of the Cumberland under William S. Rosecrans commenced a skillful campaign of maneuver. In just over twelve weeks it drove the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Braxton Bragg out of its namesake state and into northern Georgia. Jefferson Davis compelled Robert E. Lee to detach two divisions from the Army of Northern Virginia under the command of James Longstreet and send them to reinforce Bragg in anticipation of a counterstrike.

After several days of skirmishing, on September 18 the Confederates commenced their advance. One Texas soldier, William W. Heartsill, looked forward to giving the Yankees all they could handle. As he lay down for the night seeking warmth in “my old Green army coat,” Heartsill readied “to think and dream of comeing events or of loved ones at home.” It was time to beat back “cruel invaders that come to drench our sunny south in blood and drag us to worse than slavery.” There was only one thing left to do: “Up southrons and strike for God and our native land may the God of the right hover ore our Battle flag and may our independance be dated, from the begining of this pending contest,” a fight that promised to be “one of the most sanguinary and decisive battles of the war.”¹

Sanguinary certainly describes the Battle of Chickamauga, which took place over the next two days. Heartsill’s regiment spent September 19 advancing to the sound of the guns and encountering prisoners and fields covered with dead. The next day it advanced to the front. A cannon ball took the life of brigade commander James Deshler—“It is useless to pass eulogies upon Gen D. for to know him was to love him,” Heartsill remarked—but by that evening the Texas soldier could scribble his recollections of the events of the day by the light of a fire that had just that morning warmed a Yankee’s body.² Elsewhere the woods caught fire, consuming the bodies of dead and wounded soldiers.

In two days of battle each side had lost nearly one third of its strength in dead, wounded, and missing. In later years people claimed that Chickamauga meant “river of death,” and the battle seemed to sanctify that understanding. During the second day of fighting, Kentucky soldier John S. Jackman, who served in a Confederate brigade commanded by none other than Ben Hardin Helm, Mary Todd Lincoln’s brother-in-law, crossed the same ground covered by the division to which Heartsill belonged. Jackman was chilled by what he saw: “The dead of both sides were lying thick over the ground. . . . Men and horses were lying so thick over the field, one could hardly walk for them.”³ Late that morning the Kentuckians advanced, only to be repulsed three times. Helm was mortally wounded, one of some 18,454 casualties in a force some 66,000 strong.

Unfortunately for Heartsill, Jackman, and their fellow Confederates, living, wounded, and dead, Chickamauga was not decisive. Although the Rebels punched right through a gap in the Federal line on September 20, Union corps commander George H. Thomas conducted a gallant defense along Snodgrass Hill, winning the sobriquet “the Rock of Chickamauga.” At first, it appeared that Thomas might have merely staved off the inevitable, for Rosecrans pulled his army back into Chattanooga, Tennessee, only to find himself besieged by the pursuing Bragg. There it looked as if the Yankees might be starved into submission. Once the Confederates dug in and waited, however, their own generals began feuding. Before long Bragg found himself in heated combat, not with the bluecoats, but with his own commanders. President Davis declined to relieve Bragg, instead shuffling a few subordinates and earmarking Longstreet to advance upon Knoxville, Tennessee, defended by a force under the command of the ill-fated Ambrose Burnside.

Abraham Lincoln had his problems with his generals as well. When reports reached Washington claiming that Rosecrans was dispirited, desperate, and might even abandon Chattanooga altogether, the President decided to turn to the only general in the west upon whom he could rely. Orders went out naming Ulysses S. Grant commander of the newly-created Military Division of the Mississippi, putting him in charge of operations from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. Given the choice to retain Rosecrans or to elevate Thomas to command of the Army of the Cumberland, Grant chose the latter, and wired Thomas to stay where he was. Back came the answer: “I will hold the town until we starve.”<sup>4

1</sup> William W. Heartsill: Journal, September 17–28, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 523.
² Ibid., 525.
³ John S. Jackman: Diary, September 18–20, 1863, ibid., 532.
⁴ George H. Thomas to Ulysses S. Grant, October 19, 1863, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, volume 9, ed. John Y. Simon (Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 302.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Story of the Week selection on the aftermath of the Battle of Chickamauga
“The Nameless Dead,” Kate Cumming (a Confederate Army nurse)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Brooks D. Simpson: Grant lays siege to Vicksburg (May 22, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: The Battle of Chancellorsville, and the Death of Stonewall Jackson (April 30–May 6, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: General Henry Halleck writes to General Ulysses Grant: “The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves” (March 31, 1863)

Elmore Leonard: John Steinbeck “set me free”

Elmore Leonard died on August 20 at the age of 87. In the months before his death he had been working on his 46th novel. He had also been looking forward to the publication of the Library of America edition of his best fiction and had given his final approval to the selection of novels for three LOA volumes. (The first collection, scheduled to appear in September 2014, gathers four novels, all set in Detroit and published in the 1970s).

A decade ago, on April 8, 2002, Leonard was one of six prominent writers who delivered a few remarks at the twentieth-anniversary celebration of The Library of America, which took place at the The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. Joining him on the stage were Gail Buckley, Michael Cunningham, Richard Price, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Wendy Wasserstein. The presenters were asked to speak about writers from the LOA series for whom they feel a special affinity. Leonard chose John Steinbeck, and his remarks appear below.

* * *

I’m not certain how academic critics rate John Steinbeck, perhaps not up there with Hemingway and Faulkner, but I honor him today because fifty years ago he set me free. It was one book in particular, Sweet Thursday, published in 1954, that did the job.

I’ll never forget the scene in which Doc, the marine biologist, sits down to write.

Doc bought a package of yellow pads and two dozen pencils. He laid them out on his desk, the pencils sharpened to needle points and lined up like yellow soldiers. At the top of a page he printed: OBSERVATIONS AND SPECULATIONS. His pencil point broke. He took up another and drew lace around the O and the B, made a block letter out of the S and put fish hooks on each end. His ankle itched. He rolled down his sock and scratched, and that made his ear itch. “Someone’s talking about me,” he said and looked at the yellow pad. He wondered if he had fed the cotton rats. It is easy to forget when you’re thinking.

He feeds the rats and remembers he hasn’t eaten.

When he finished a page or two he would fry some eggs. But wouldn’t it be better to eat first so that his flow of thought would not be interrupted later? . . . He fried two eggs and ate them, staring at the yellow pad under the hanging light. The light was too bright. It reflected painfully on the paper. Doc finished his eggs, got out a sheet of tracing paper, and taped it to the bottom of the shade below the globe. It took time to make it neat. He sat in front of the yellow pad again and drew lace around all the letters of the title, tore off the page, and threw it away. Five pencil points were broken now. He sharpened them and lined them up with their brothers.

Doc looks out the window to see a car drive past and a girl come out of the Bear Flag and walk along Cannery Row.

He writes a few lines after observing the way the girl walks, with pride but not vanity. And his pencil point breaks. “He took another, and it broke with a jerk, making a little tear in the paper. He read what he had written; dull, desiccated, he thought.” The scene ends with Doc getting up and going across the street for a beer.

It amazes me that a writer as renowned as Steinbeck knew the tricks of putting off writing. I’ve found myself paying bills—and that might’ve been, un- or sub-consciously, an incentive to get to work. It encourages me that it was part of writing and not a disease.

But what encouraged me much more is in the prologue of Sweet Thursday. A character, Mack from Cannery Row, says he was never satisfied with that book. He says,

I would of went about it different. . . . I like a lot of talk in a book, and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. And another thing—I kind of like to figure out what he’s thinking by what he says. I like some description too . . . I like to know what color a thing is, how it smells and maybe how it looks, and maybe how a guy feels about it—but not too much of that . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. The guy’s writing it, give him a chance to spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up in the story.

He suggests putting it right at first or in chapters, which Steinbeck did in Sweet Thursday. Chapters 3 and 38 have headings: Hooptedoodle one and two.

That became the backbone of my tendrils for success and happiness in writing fiction: mainly don’t describe too much, unless you really know what you’re doing. In my rules, I say “These are rules I picked up along the way to help me remain invisible while I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story.” And if you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over. For me that is what John Steinbeck inspired, the simplicity that if you can’t do it well, don’t do it. If you can do something well . . . from that time on, 1954, I concentrated on telling my stories in dialogue so I wouldn’t have to describe the characters.

Ian Frazier on why Ring Lardner is “a major figure in twentieth-century letters”

Photo by Sigrid Estrada

Writer and humorist Ian Frazier, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the author of many books (including the best-selling Travels in Siberia) spoke with us recently about the newly published Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings, which he edited for The Library of America.

Why should people read this book? Why should they care about Ring Lardner?

Ring Lardner wrote like nobody else, caught the feel of his era like nobody else, and knew how to make people laugh with a voice or a plot change-up or a small misspelling. He was a major figure in twentieth-century American letters.

Contemporaries called the language of Lardner’s stories “Lardnerese.” What is Lardnerese? What were his special gifts or contributions as a stylist?

As this anthology shows, Lardner heard his own voice with perfect clarity from the time he was a teenager. Just as clearly, he registered the way people around him talked in the Midwestern places where he lived and where he worked as a young man. He had a genius’s ear for living speech, and he went beyond the range of ordinary orthography to capture that speech in writing. His typewriter was like a John Cage prepared piano—it made sounds, and produced corresponding narratives, that were all its own.

How did your sense of Lardner as person or writer change while working on this book?

He was an amazing man—passionate and ice-cold simultaneously. As I learned more about him I saw him as an enigmatic, cold American—like a Clint Eastwood character in a Western, or like D. H. Lawrence’s definition of an American: “isolate, and a killer.” Those qualities come out especially, I think, in Lardner’s brilliant, often hilarious, and always merciless stories. But Lardner was a good friend and a gentle family man, too. That is apparent in his letters and in his biography. He had outstanding, remarkable children.

If Lardner were around today, what do you think he’d be doing for a living?

He would be writing—no one with a gift as great as his would be able to ignore it. But I’m not sure what. If he were around today, or if Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Harold Ross were around today, today would be something other than it is.

Do you detect his influence on other writers?

Definitely. On Thurber, for one. He laid out a Midwestern scene for Thurber to populate with Thurber characters. Lardner’s middle-class settings and small-town plots presage O’Hara, Updike, and Cheever. And Lardner’s view of the psychic obtuseness and frailty and in-spite-of-themselves lovability of baseball players has influenced the way generations of writers have portrayed athletes.

Best discovery while working on book?

I loved rereading pieces, well-known and not, that I hadn’t looked at for a long time. I had never seen his World War I writings, and I really enjoyed those. I hadn’t known how much the war had been a part of his early career and life. I admired Ellis Abbott, whom he courted in Lardnerian prose and who married him—luckily for him. She was a Midwestern aristocrat of the first rank, and a really cool person.

What do you think readers will find most surprising?

Maybe the extreme, ahead-of-its-time modernism of his short plays.

Favorite piece in collection?

The Young Immigrunts! This is a magic piece of humor writing. “ ‘Shut up,’ he explained,” is as funny as it is possible to be in only four words. But every line in this story is a magic trick. The only difference between this story and what actual magicians do is that their tricks can be explained. I’ve looked at The Young Immigrunts dozens of times, always with the same mystified delight, and I still couldn’t tell you how it was done.

Read The Young Immigrunts—in its entirety, with original illustrations by Gaar Williams—at The Library of America’s Story of the Week!

John Hollander (1929–2013)

John Hollander at a 2004 event to celebrate
the publication of American Wits.
Photo by Star Black

It was with great sadness that we learned over the weekend that poet and critic John Hollander had died at the age of 83. Hollander was a longtime advisor to The Library of America, who freely offered his incomparable expertise and shepherded six volumes to print, including the landmark two-volume collection American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century.

LOA editor-in-chief Geoffrey O’Brien recalls the pleasure of having Hollander for a colleague:

Working with John Hollander on his two-volume Library of America anthology American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century was like being given an intimately detailed tour of a country until then scarcely known. The large familiar landmarks—Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Poe—took on a new character when surrounded by scores of their contemporaries from every corner of that culture of verse which for John was a luxuriant garden. He wasn’t interested in reducing literary history to a few essential writers: his taste for poetry was expansive, extending to a multitude of minor and occasional voices. The hours spent getting texts and notes in order for this immense undertaking remain in memory as a delight, informed as they were by his profound knowledge and by an affection equally profound for the materials in hand. Nothing could have been less dry or schoolmasterish than his capacity to find the hum of poetry even at its most attenuated frequencies.

Other Library of America volumes edited or co-edited by Hollander include Henry James: Complete Stories 1892–1898, American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse, Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems, and the Paperback Classics edition of the Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass. He also served on the advisory board for the two volumes of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century.

See today’s New York Times for an extended summary of Hollander’s remarkable career.

Henry S. F. Cooper Jr. celebrates the environmental vision of his ancestorJames Fenimore Cooper

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the 2013 New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.’s tribute to his great-great-grandfather James Fenimore Cooper. Mr. Cooper is the author of numerous books on space exploration and was for many years a staff writer at The New Yorker. His remarks were delivered by his daughter, film producer Molly Cooper, joined on stage by her cousin Sage Mehta, who offered a reading from one of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels.

Molly Cooper,
with Sage Mehta in the background
Photograph by Tatiana Breslow

My father once told me that people who talked too much about their ancestors were like potatoes: The best part of them is underground. I always try to remember that, but it may be a tough piece of advice to follow tonight.

My father, when my brother and sisters and I were young, used to read The Leatherstocking Tales to us out loud. We would lie on the floor, put our heads under the couch, and go to sleep. It was a great many years before I finally came around and learned to appreciate the books in their own right.

One of the important things about Cooper is that, as a novelist, he has chalked up a great many “firsts.” This may not have been as difficult for America’s first well-known novelist as it would be for writers today; back then, the field of “firsts” was fairly open. For example, he wrote our first international blockbusters. He wrote the first Westerns. He wrote the first novels of the sea by someone who had actually been to sea. He was the first American novelist to make a living from his writing. And, of course, he was, in The Leatherstocking Tales, the first novelist to bring the American wilderness, and the American Indian, to a national, and then an international, audience.

Cooper’s love of the wilderness led to his being a very early, and major, source of the conservation movement in this country. He came by his love of the wilderness naturally. He grew up in Cooperstown, a village founded in 1789 by his father. It is at the foot of a large lake—the Glimmerglass of The Deerslayer. It was, and is, surrounded by woods. Cooper, and his next older brother, William, grew up in these woods and on the lake. “They are quite wild,” their older sister Hannah wrote of them. When their father was elected to Congress in 1797 in Philadelphia, his wife, who hated the wilderness, wanted to move the family with him; but her two youngest children put their collective feet down and refused to go. She remained. Cooper wrote in the introduction to The Pioneers, published in 1823, that it was his childhood in Cooperstown that gave him his strong feelings about nature; it was these feelings that later in his writings he broadcast across the country and around the world.

He was also an early source in this country of the environmental movement. Environmentalism, of course, goes a step beyond conservation, because by conserving nature, you preserve that which sustains you. The whole succession of the five Leatherstocking Tales is a steady progression westward, as Leatherstocking and his friend Chingachgook keep moving on in order to stay ahead of the settlers with their axes, chopping down the forests that Leatherstocking and his friend depend upon for a living. In The Pioneers, much is made of the “wasty ways” of the settlers. They cut down trees indiscriminately, including the sugar maple, which uniquely supplied them with the makings of maple sugar, a major product of the woodlands. They haul in fish by the net-full, leaving most of them to rot on the shore. One of the great scenes in The Pioneers is the migratory flight of the passenger pigeons over the Lake, darkening the sky. The settlers run out with their shotguns, peppering the sky with shot and bringing down the birds by the thousands; Leatherstocking shoots just one, leading to a homily about never killing more birds or fish than you actually need, lest you destroy that which sustains you. As you know, the last passenger pigeon died early in the last century.

In a sense, Cooper still lives. For one thing, his books have not been out of print since the early 1820s, not true of any other American novelist. And environmentalists in Cooperstown, which include some members of my family, are very apt to quote him in their never-ending battles against local unplanned developers. Cooper’s descendants are still in Cooperstown; indeed, the story of Cooper children compelling their mother to stay there has been repeated at least once. Cooper is at his best when he is writing about nature, whether it be the wilderness or the sea. Melville and Conrad have acknowledged their debt to him. Cooper’s writing can at times be turgid—if two old pioneers, or two old salts, are cracking jokes, it is time to turn the page. But give him a break. He was writing before almost any American novelist you ever heard of. When he is in the woods or at sea, he is unbeatable; at its best, his writing is powerful and lyrical. He was the most prominent literary pioneer of this country. I am very happy that The Empire State Center for the Book and The New York Library Association have selected him for the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

Now I will stop, lest you think I really am a potato.

At a June 4 ceremony here in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted eight writers into the New York States Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-born or based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2013 included living writers Marilyn Hacker, Alice McDermott, Walter Mosley, and Calvin Trillin, as well as James Fenimore Cooper, Countee Cullen, Miguel Piñero, and Maurice Sendak.

A recent Story of the Week selection:
“Storm and Shipwreck,” from James Fenimore Cooper’s Ned Myers

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Honor Moore on Marilyn Hacker
Charles Molesworth on Countée Cullen
Dan Barry on Alice McDermott
Daniel Gallant on Miguel Piñero
Paul O. Zelinsky on Maurice Sendak

Paul O. Zelinsky on Maurice Sendak: “books for children can and should acknowledge a full range of human emotions”

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the 2013 New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Paul O. Zelinsky’s tribute to Maurice Sendak. Zelinsky is a Caldecott Medal–winning illustrator of such celebrated children’s books as The Wheels on the Bus, Rapunzel, and Z is for Moose.

Paul O. Zelinsky
Photograph by Tatiana Breslow

I want to express my gratitude for the privilege of inducting Maurice Sendak into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. I only wish that he could be here to accept the honor, which I understand came very close to happening only last year, but it proved to be impossible. Maurice Sendak is already, I am fairly sure, the most honored figure in American children’s literature, having won every major award in the field. But as everyone in the field knows, it’s unusual to find a children’s book creator even in the running when honors are going to makers of grown-up art. This award, and the company it places him in, would have pleased Maurice greatly.

I hope you’ll excuse me if I presume to speak for him. I knew Maurice, perhaps not as closely as some, but longer than most, since the fall of ‘71 when I had the luck to be in the first class he ever taught. So I have heard him express many opinions and ideas, always with great fervor. And I seem to have absorbed these ideas well enough that I now carry around inside my head a little Maurice Sendak voice, which rises up occasionally to render praise or spew invective in the unrestrained and hilarious way that you might have glimpsed if you saw Stephen Colbert’s interview with him on television.

The idea that put Maurice on the cultural map was his insistence, embodied in picture books that caught the attention and earned the love of young readers everywhere, that books for children can and should acknowledge a full range of human emotions, not just the pretty or instructive ones. There is wildness in every soul, and that is as it should be. From the beginning, Sendak’s drawings were unusually expressive—vivid, funny, and full of spirit. He was already highly visible as an illustrator when Where the Wild Things Are unleashed this radical idea on the world. That it is no longer radical is proof of its enduring influence. Sendak’s books affected the very way Americans understand what childhood is.

These books don’t set out to teach lessons, but they do contain ideas—not intellectual statements, but something more like thoughts wrapped in a mystery. Maurice looked for reverberations and he looked for meaning, and he believed fiercely that what he discovered, if he worked it up right, would be accessible to anyone of any age who was open to it. If one of these right, reverberating images happened to upset the adult guardians of good behavior, it was not Maurice’s concern. In the Night Kitchen’s sensual dream broke through boundaries and disturbed a great many gatekeepers not because Maurice wanted to, but because the book needed to.

Maurice Sendak loved art; he loved it high and he loved it low. For years he worked to the strains of Mozart, who made his way into the illustrations of Outside Over There. Melville was not only an obsessively favorite writer, Herman Melville was, and still is, Maurice’s beloved German Shepherd. A massive collection of antique Mickey Mice infested Maurice’s house. He got the Disney people to give him a videotape of Pinocchio at a time when Disney cartoons were rigorously kept unavailable outside of their measured theatrical release. No matter how high or low Maurice’s own art is, and whether it works best for people whose age is one digit long, or two, or three, it is fully appropriate to pay tribute to it, and to him, here, with this induction.

Coming together like this to honor a great talent, we are also honoring ourselves, creating a link between us and this artist, or what there is of the artist that lives in our heads, in a way that links us together as well. And in the end, isn’t that the best place and the perfect response for an artist and his art?

Still, there was a Maurice Sendak who very much had his own head and didn’t need to live in ours; he lived in Brooklyn, then in Manhattan, and even though he moved to Connecticut for the second half of his life, he never gave up his Greenwich Village apartment, which qualifies him all the more for this New York State award. I miss him a lot. I am proud to induct Maurice Sendak into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

At a June 4 ceremony here in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted eight writers into the New York States Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-born or based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2013 included living writers Marilyn Hacker, Alice McDermott, Walter Mosley, and Calvin Trillin, as well as James Fenimore Cooper, Countee Cullen, Miguel Piñero, and Maurice Sendak.

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Honor Moore on Marilyn Hacker
Charles Molesworth on Countée Cullen
Dan Barry on Alice McDermott
Daniel Gallant on Miguel Piñero

Forthcoming from The Library of America (Winter–Spring 2014)

The Library of America is pleased to announce six new volumes for the Winter–Spring 2014 season, including two authors (William Wells Brown, Bernard Malamud) new to the series.

For a list of titles to be published for the remainder of the current year, see our Summer–Fall 2013 announcement.

William Wells Brown
Clotel & Other Writings
Ezra Greenspan, editor
Clotel • The American Fugitive in Europe • The Escape • The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements • My Southern Home
February 2014
Library of America #247 / ISBN 978-1-59853-291-3

Bernard Malamud
Novels and Stories of the 1940s & 50s
Philip Davis, editor
The Natural • The Assistant • over twenty stories
March 2014
Library of America #248 / ISBN 978-1-59853-292-0

Bernard Malamud
Novels and Stories of the 1960s
Philip Davis, editor
A New Life • The Fixer • Pictures of Fidelman • ten stories
March 2014
Library of America #249 / ISBN 978-1-59853-293-7

The Civil War
The Final Year Told By Those Who Lived It
Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editor
March 2014
Library of America #250 / ISBN 978-1-59853-294-4

Shakespeare in America
An Anthology from the Revolution to Now
James Shapiro, editor
Foreword by President Bill Clinton
April 2014
Library of America #251 / ISBN 978-1-59853-295-1

Kurt Vonnegut
Novels 1976–1985
Sidney Offit, editor
Slapstick • Jailbird • Deadeye Dick • Galápagos
May 2014
Library of America #252 / ISBN 978-1-59853-304-0

NEW IN PAPERBACK
Becoming Americans
Immigrants Tell Their Stories from Jamestown to Today
January 2014
A Special Publication of The Library of America / ISBN 978-1-59853-290-6
(Originally published in hardcover as Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing.)

In addition, the following title (which had previously been announced for the fall of 2013), will now appear in May 2014. The final list of musicals that will be included in this two-volume set appears below.

American Musicals
The Complete Books & Lyrics of Sixteen Classic Broadway Shows
Laurence Maslon, editor
Show Boat • As Thousands Cheer • Pal Joey • Oklahoma! • On the Town • Finian’s Rainbow • Kiss Me, Kate • South Pacific • Guys and Dolls • The Pajama Game • My Fair Lady • Gypsy • A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum • Fiddler on the Roof • Cabaret • 1776
May 2014
Boxed set / ISBN 978-1-59853-257-9
Volume 1: 1927–1949 / Library of America #253 / ISBN 978-1-59853-258-6
Volume 2: 1950–1969 / Library of America #254 / ISBN 978-1-59853-259-3

Daniel Gallant on Miguel Piñero: “he blazed a memorable trail through New York City’s cultural scene”

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the 2013 New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Daniel Gallant’s tribute to poet and playwright Miguel Piñero. Gallant is executive director of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a non-profit cultural organization located in Lower Manhattan which Piñero helped to found in 1973.

Daniel Gallant
Photograph by Tatiana Breslow

When you enter the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on East 3rd Street, if you turn to your right just inside the door, you’ll see a striking poster, high up on the wall. It commands attention and anchors the space. The poster is from a movie called Piñero, and the artist who inspired that film was an enigmatic outlaw poet who brought lyricism and brutal truth to his work in verse, theater, and film. Along with fellow poets Pedro Pietri, Sandra María Esteves, and Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero helped launch the Nuyorican literary movement and its eponymous Cafe. Piñero and his colleagues won a place at the cultural table for artists of color whose work exists outside the mainstream.

Mikey Piñero possessed a heightened creative fervor and he blazed a memorable trail through New York City’s cultural scene. He was a complicated man, and he came up through challenging circumstances. Mikey entered the welfare system, the gang system, and the prison system at an early age. His landmark play Short Eyes was composed while he served a term in Sing-Sing.

But in the face of hardship, Piñero developed a willingness to subvert literary convention and dodge the constraints of the entertainment industry. The literary scene of the early 1970s was not a welcoming place for Latino poets or playwrights, especially those outside the academic sphere. But Piñero helped to bring the rhythms of street life and elements of Latino identity into the mainstream cultural consciousness.

His work depicted brutal realities of urban existence. In one of his best-known poems, Piñero praised the Lower East Side’s “fancy cars and pimp’s bars and juke saloons and greasy spoons”, as well as the neighborhood’s “stabbing shooting gambling fighting & unnatural dying & new birth crying.”

The Lower East Side of 2013 is not the neighborhood that Mikey Piñero knew. To love the LES during Piñero’s time was to love a hard-scrabble, drug-saturated landscape that nonetheless bled culture and birthed magnificent works of art. Gone are many grassroots fixtures of Piñero’s East Village, as well as its drug dens and violent reputation. Yet the mix of cultural and artistic influences that Piñero embodied remains a consistent subtext of the neighborhood, and of New York City as a whole.

Piñero’s art spoke to the conflicts and harmonies inherent in dual identity. The works he wrote about the interplay between Puerto Rican and New York City culture continue to resonate with artists and audiences who dwell at the intersection of multiple communities.

Mikey and the other founders of the Nuyorican literary movement broadened the field of poetry—they expanded the art form’s reach, diversity, complexity, and accessibility. Mikey Piñero showed us that art not only survives but flourishes in difficult conditions, and that a Latino poet raised in poverty can take his place among the pantheon of celebrated literary figures.

Many authors live on through their written work, long after they themselves have passed. Piñero lives on through the verse, energy, ferocity, and pride of New York City’s performance poets, as well as through artists in hip hop and theater who have embraced the raw immediacy of his verse and playwriting.

Just as that poster stares down from the wall of the Cafe, inspiring and challenging each poet who stands on our stage, so the body of Piñero’s work stands above the contemporary poetic scene as a reminder and a promise.

Today’s spoken word artists have learned from Piñero’s legacy the potential of verse to elevate, to motivate, and to illuminate. We at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe are grateful that the Empire State Center for the Book and the New York Writers Hall of Fame have chosen to honor one of our founders, Miguel Piñero.

At a June 4 ceremony here in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted eight writers into the New York States Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-born or based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2013 included living writers Marilyn Hacker, Alice McDermott, Walter Mosley, and Calvin Trillin, as well as James Fenimore Cooper, Countee Cullen, Miguel Piñero, and Maurice Sendak.

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Honor Moore on Marilyn Hacker
Charles Molesworth on Countée Cullen
Dan Barry on Alice McDermott

Dan Barry on Alice McDermott: exploring the human condition with “the echo of the regionally familiar”

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the 2013 New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Dan Barry’s tribute to fellow Long Islander Alice McDermott. Barry is a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, where he has written the “This Land” column since 2007. Barry’s tribute is followed below by Ms. McDermott’s remarks.

Dan Barry
Photographs by Tatiana Breslow

Alice McDermott has sometimes been called a New York novelist.

That is—a New York Long Island novelist.

That is, a New York Long Island Nassau County novelist.

That is, a New York Long Island Nassau County novelist NOT from the North Shore, up there in Gatsby country, but kind of between the Roosevelt Field Mall, over by Garden City, and the Green Acres Mall, over there in Valley Stream, off of Sunrise.

On Long Island, you can be defined by your proximity to a mall. For example, I’m from over by the South Shore Mall.

This geo-specific attempt to categorize Alice, by the way, is so misleading, if not flat-out inaccurate, that the denizens of the food court at the mall would have one reaction:

“Nice try.”

Which is a Long Island way of saying: Wrong.

This is because Long Island is the land of indirection and misdirection. Where we come from, if you want to compliment someone’s haircut, you say, “Nice haircut.” And if you want to ridicule someone’s haircut, you say, “Nice haircut.”

It’s complicated.


But Long Islanders can also be quite blunt, so let’s be blunt: Alice McDermott is not an Irish American writer, or a Roman Catholic writer—or a New York writer. She is, simply, a brilliant writer. A writer of international standing. A writer for the ages.

Yes, it is true: The unforgettable characters that Alice has created inhabit a specific place on the map of fiction. A quote-unquote Long Island place, informed so deeply by the exhilarating rush of the big city asphalt to the west and by the healing solitude of the sand dunes to the far, far east.

In this place you will find Sheryl and Rick, the Romeo and Juliet lovers of That Night; the three unmarried Towne sisters of At Weddings and Wakes; John and Mary Keane, the ordinary, extraordinary married couple of After This; and, of course, himself, Billy Lynch, Charming Billy. You will also find that all about there are many, many children, their innocence being rubbed away as they take in the complications that await them in adulthood.

This place is a concrete place, a place of ticky-tacky houses with postage-stamp lawns and sidewalks disturbed by the roots of trees; of churches where we both celebrate and mourn amid the whiff of incense; of delicatessens and traffic jams and, yes, runs to the mall.

Its inhabitants are concrete people, everyday people, living everyday lives—mowing lawns, rushing to catch the express on the Long Island Rail Road, collapsing in front of the television with a drink. You and I know this place; these people.

Yet they are a thoroughly imagined people, and this is an entirely imagined place, given substance and flesh only by Alice’s exacting use of word and image. She needs no pyrotechnic devices in her plots to bring them alive; there are no bank heists, no cross-country adventures. Her stories are more dramatic than that because she captures the wonder and the horror and the romance and the grief in the interior of our daily routines.

She uses the echo of the regionally familiar to explore the essential questions of the human condition. Questions about faith, mortality, sibling rivalry, the limits of love, the futility of war, the tabula rasa of childhood—the smallest moment, something said, something seen, that can alter an entire life. These are the questions being asked in Bay Shore and in Beirut; in Massapequa and in Mogadishu. Universal questions.

Throughout the McDermott canon, there is also an undercurrent of enduring hope. The endless search for—and occasional grasp of—those moments of grace that make life worth living; moments found in the smell of a baby’s shampooed hair, or the warmth of a grandmother’s soft hand.

This is the journey we all take, and who better to lead us, to encourage us to pause along the way and take note, than Alice McDermott.

Here we are, hearing the sad, chiming music in the clink of the ice in Veronica’s drink in At Weddings and Wakes. Here we are, in After This, enjoying a simple day at Jones Beach with John and Mary Keane and their three children, the realization of how fleeting all this is upon them. Here we are, in Charming Billy, at that bar-and-grill in the Bronx, for the in-after following the funeral. We smell the hint of mildew in the place, that mix of past and present. We taste the roast beef, medium rare, and the green beans amandine.

And we are at the table among the mourners, clucking and whispering and gossiping—and trying to make sense of life and death.

I recently reread several of Alice’s novels, and I came away with one overriding thought. Two, actually.

The first is: How gifted she is. Every word she writes is so carefully chosen, so perfectly in concert with every other word, that she is incapable of constructing a lazy sentence. Every paragraph carries a pulse, a mixture of immediacy and reflection and, often, humor. This is how she describes a difficult woman who owns but never uses a beach house on the East End of Long Island:

“The only pleasure she ever got from it was the ability to withhold invitations to visit.”

And the second thought is that Alice McDermott is our Faulkner; our Joyce. Long Island is her South; her Dublin. She isn’t a New York writer so much as she is a writer from New York. And we, the people of New York State, are so fortunate to claim her. She belongs in the New York State Writers’ Hall of Fame.

And this guy from Long Island says, sincerely:

Nice. Very nice.

Ladies and gentlemen: Alice McDermott.

* * *

Alice McDermott

My mother was eighty when she first visited Ireland, the country both her parents had left early in the last century. She went on a two week tour with some of my cousins and when she returned I was surprised to discover that her enthusiasm for the place was somewhat subdued. Didn’t she find the country beautiful, I asked her. Didn’t she find the people charming? Oh sure, she said. It was lovely, it was fine.

Trying to prompt a more passionate response, I asked her, “Now that you’ve seen Ireland, don’t you feel closer to your parents?”

“Now that I’ve seen Ireland,” she replied, “I’m more grateful than ever that my mother moved to Brooklyn.”

Tonight, I, too, am grateful that my grandmother moved to Brooklyn. And that my parents moved from Brooklyn to Elmont. And that we took our family vacations in East Hampton. And that when the time came for me to go to college I took my Regents scholarship to Oswego.

The immigrant enclaves of the city, the post-war developments of Nassau County’s suburbs, the natural, as well as the man made, loveliness of the South Fork, provided this developing writer with a geographic metaphor I’m still exploring: a metaphor of yearning, of aspiration. Of the enduring—and, to me, astonishing—human effort, born of love, to discover something better for the next generation, something more certain, something more secure, something that speaks to our barely intuited but persistent longing for peace, for beauty.

Bustling immigrant ghetto, cookie cutter houses on square green lawns, the breathtaking sweep of dune grass, sand, endless sea. The novelist’s fundamental question—What does my character want? —was made vivid for this aspiring writer by the very geography of my corner of New York State.

What was not so vivid to me in those formative years was that I was a writer at all, aspiring or any other kind. But because I took my Regents scholarship to Oswego – Oswego was rated the number three party school that year—I found myself in an English class with Dr. Paul Briand, a retired Air Force colonel who called me down to the podium at the end of class – a class titled the Nature of Nonfiction, to which I had submitted as my first assignment an autobiographical essay that was complete fiction—and said, “I’ve got bad news for you, kid. You’re a writer. And you’ll never shake it.”

Oswego gave me many gifts: chief among them was the lifelong assurance that the world’s great literature, its novels and its poetry, belongs wholly to each one of us—despite the number of people I have encountered over the years who seem to believe that the literary arts belong more legitimately to the kids who studied English at places like Harvard or Yale. But on that night in Dr. Briand’s class, I was also given my career. And I suppose I have my grandmother who had the good sense to move to Brooklyn to thank for that as well.

At a June 4 ceremony here in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted eight writers into the New York States Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-born or based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2013 included living writers Marilyn Hacker, Alice McDermott, Walter Mosley, and Calvin Trillin, as well as James Fenimore Cooper, Countee Cullen, Miguel Piñero, and Maurice Sendak.

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Honor Moore on Marilyn Hacker
Charles Molesworth on Countée Cullen