He went on to win awards for Ragtime (1975), World’s Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989) and The March (2005). He combined writing with working as an editor through the 60s with writers including Ian Fleming, Ayn Rand and Norman Mailer, before he left the world of publishing in 1969 to write full-time. “So I wrote a parody in a fit of rage, showed it to the story editor, and he said: ‘This is good, you want to make a novel out of this.’ I crossed out the title, wrote ‘Chapter One’, and went from there.” “It was making me ill, reading one lousy western after another,” he told the Guardian.
His first novel, Welcome to Hard Times - published in 1960 when he was 28 - was inspired by a stint working as a reader for a film company. I was too young to understand the Depression or fight in World War II. He was drafted into the US army in Germany during the 1950s, serving as a corporal in the signal corps during the Allied occupation and telling the Paris Review: “I seem to be of a generation that has somehow missed the crucial collective experiences of our time.
0 kommentar(er)
