Sorrentino’s authoritative and sympathetic portrait revives a “bohemian rebel” and prolific, groundbreaking writer.
Thoroughly researched biography of Stephen Crane (1871-1900), who shocked his contemporaries with raw, gritty fiction.
Sorrentino (English/Virginia Tech; editor: Stephen Crane Remembered, 2006, etc.) faced challenges in writing this biography: mainly, previous books that perpetuated errors and lies and few sources to set the record straight. His study chronicles the personal and literary struggles of a controversial writer who vowed to live “a life of fire.” The youngest son in a large family of precociously intelligent children, Crane refused to follow in his father’s footsteps as a minister, instead hoping to train at West Point for a military career. However, his plan was deflected by an older brother’s advice to enter a mining-engineering program at Lafayette College. There, and later at Syracuse University, Crane was a mediocre student, preferring to drink, smoke, play poker and carouse with his fraternity brothers; he finally dropped out and moved to New York City, intent on becoming a writer. While barely supporting himself as a journalist, he finished a novel drawn from the life he observed in the city’s slums: “the bleak portrayal of a naïve, sentimental girl in the tenements of New York.” Unable to find a publisher for Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Crane published the book himself, winning praise from writer Hamlin Garland and influential editor William Dean Howells. The novel, Sorrentino writes, was “the first significant example of literary determinism in American literature,” but its candor and pessimism made critics wary of reviewing it. Three years later, though, The Red Badge of Courage, Crane’s psychological study of a Civil War soldier, generated adulation and fame. Good fortune was short-lived, however; bad business decisions and “questionable ethics” eroded what he earned, and Crane’s last years were fraught with financial troubles. He kept writing, always hoping for a fresh start, until tuberculosis killed him at the age of 28.
Sorrentino’s authoritative and sympathetic portrait revives a “bohemian rebel” and prolific, groundbreaking writer.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-04953-6
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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