A lively peek into literary genius.
A tour of the various sources of inspiration for beloved works of literature.
Debut author Grogan was once given a familiar piece of advice—“Make a list of the people who inspire you, then go learn everything you can about who inspired them”—and he turned it into this unconventional and ambitious research project. He investigates the origins of 202 famous works of literature and briefly synopsizes the circumstances of each, typically in a page or so. The author focuses on the creative afflatus that preceded each work, and he attempts to pin down just how an author arrived at the general idea or a key character and why each felt compelled to pursue that particular spark of imagination. Ultimately, Grogan found that the most common seedbed of creativity is personal experience, which, as he demonstrates, can be understood broadly. For example, both Hermann Hesse and Sylvia Plath conjured stories out of their own specific forms of anguish. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was partially based on her own encounters with racism but also on interviews that she conducted with sharecroppers who’d been threatened with eviction. Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle was largely inspired by his co-workers at General Electric, and he modeled the character of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, in particular, on Nobel laureate Dr. Irving Langmuir. Maurice Sendak loathed his weekly visits from his family members when he lived in Brooklyn, and the caricatures he drew of his relatives became the beasts in Where the Wild Things Are. Grogan’s research is meticulous and empirical—he often draws from published interviews with the authors in question and lets them speak for themselves. His own prose is more informally anecdotal than scholarly in tone, and it’s so breezily accessible that there’s no need to read the vignettes all at once or in any particular order. Some accounts are more speculative than others; for example, it’s not indisputable, for instance, that Franz Kafka was motivated to write The Metamorphosis because of his dysfunctional relationship with his father. However, even Grogan’s speculations are consistently thoughtful and enjoyable.
A lively peek into literary genius.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60433-751-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Cider Mill Press
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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