This compulsively readable collection of profiles and essays by James Campbell, tied together by a beguiling autobiographical thread, proffers unique observations on writers and writing in the post-1950s period. Campbell considers writers associated with the
New Yorker magazine, including John Updike, William Maxwell, Truman Capote, and Jonathan Franzen. Continuing his longterm engagement with African American authors, he offers an account of his legal battle with the FBI over James Baldwin’s file and a new profile of Amiri Baraka. He also focuses on the Beat poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, as well as writers such as Edmund White and Thom Gunn. Campbell’s concluding essay on his childhood in Scotland gracefully connects the book’s autobiographical dots.
Table des matières
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART I NEW YORK NEW YORKERS
1. Sunshine and Shadows: AProfile of John Updike
2. Updike’s Village Sex
3. William Maxwell’s Lives
4. Notes from a Small Island: AProfile of Shirley Hazzard
5. Love, Truman: Capote’s Letters and Stories
6. Franzen, Oprah, and High Art
7. Drawing Pains: A Profile of Art Spiegelman
8. Listening in the Dark: AProfile of William Styron
PART II THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE
9. I Heard It through the Grapevine: James Baldwin and the FBI
10. The Island Affair: Richard Wright’s Unpublished Last Novel
11. The Man Who Cried: John A. Williams
12. All That Jive: Stanley Crouch
13. Love Lost: Toni Morrison
14. The Rhetoric of Rage: AProfile of Amiri Baraka
PART III SYNCOPATIONS
15. High Peak Haikus: AProfile of Gary Snyder
16. Between Moving Air and Moving Ocean: Thom Gunn and Gary Snyder
17. Was That a Real Poem?: Robert Creeley
18. Fifty Years of ‘Howl’
19. Personal/Political: AProfile of Edmund White
20. To Beat the Bible: AProfile of J. P. Donleavy
21. The Making of a Monster: Alexander Trocchi
22. Travels with RLS
Coda: Boswell and Mrs. Miller; A Memoir of Two Tongues
A propos de l’auteur
James Campbell is the author of Exiled in Paris and This Is the Beat Generation. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and was for many years an editor and columnist at the Times Literary Supplement in London.