Last Book Read

Erskine Caldwell: A Biography by Harvey L. Klevar.




Here's what Kirkus had to say about it:

Klevar (Anthropology/Luther College) was following a childhood fascination with Tobacco Road when he met the aging, laconic, and secretive Caldwell (1903-87) and gained permission to write his authorized biography--a task he fulfills here with tact, dignity, sympathy, and in a self-effacing style that Caldwell would have liked. Klevar poses two questions: Why the falling-off after the brilliant seven years in the 30's that produced God's Little Acre and Tobacco Road? And what made these tales of poverty and deprivation, of grotesque characters and hopeless lives--the ``strange flowers of humanity,'' as Joseph Warren Beach called them--so appealing, selling millions of copies in cheap reprints? A strange flower himself, Caldwell was educated mostly at home by his protective mother and rigid father, a Presbyterian minister. He grew up a brooding, repressed man, dependent on women, failing at several jobs and schools before finding his calling as a writer. It was with the first of his four wives, Helen, that he did his best work and endured the most poverty. The falling-off began with his mercurial second wife, photographer Margaret Bourke-White; continued with his demanding third, June, whose negotiations made the divorce last longer than the marriage; and settled into a kind of plateau of fame with his fourth and ``perfect'' wife, the devoted and adoring Virginia. A self-styled ``outcast among literary guys,'' Caldwell made a fortune writing screenplays, and he traveled the world promoting the cheap reprints of his work. His stormy business arrangements with publishers, agents, and lawyers reveal the challenges of the marketplace to a thoughtful writer coming of age in the world of modern publishing (a writer, ironically, whose affluence came from writing about poverty). While Klevar suggests that Helen and poverty lay behind the creative period of the 30's--that in capturing the popular voice, Caldwell alienated the critics--his respect for the mystery of Caldwell exceeds the temptation of such easy answers. Get a copy.



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Last Book Read

The last book I read was "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" by Carl G. Jung. The first couple chapters, about his youth, were fascinating; the rest of the book was pure gobbledygook to me, much like Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." See for yourself.

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Last Book Read

The last book I read was The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. I always thought this book was just an expose on the Chicago meat-packing industry, which led to the creation of the FDA & other safety measures; but I recently learned that that was a back story to a wonderful novel about a down-on-their-luck family. I was not disappointed. Recommend. Get a copy





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Last Book Read

My last book read was "Letters From the Editor - The New Yorker's Harold Ross." This isn't as laugh-out-loud hilarious as James Thurber's bio on Ross, but it definitely has its moments. Recommend.

From the hardcover edition:
These exhilarating letters—selected and introduced by Thomas Kunkel, who wrote Genius in Disguise, the distinguished Ross biography—tell the dramatic story of the birth of The New Yorker and its precarious early days and years. Ross worries about everything from keeping track of office typewriters to the magazine's role in wartime to the exact questions to be asked for a "Talk of the Town" piece on the song "Happy Birthday." We find Ross, in Kunkel's words, "scolding Henry Luce, lecturing Orson Welles, baiting J. Edgar Hoover, inviting Noel Coward and Ginger Rogers to the circus, wheedling Ernest Hemingway— offering to sell Harpo Marx a used car and James Cagney a used tractor, and explaining to restaurateur-to-the-stars Dave Chasen, step by step, how to smoke a turkey." These letters from a supreme editor tell in his own words the story of the fierce, lively man who launched the world's most prestigious magazine. Own a copy

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