Word: chatwin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bruce Chatwin always seemed almost too good to be true: an "alarmingly handsome" golden boy who became a director of Sotheby's at 25, quit to go to Patagonia and came back with what the blurbists now call "the most influential travel book in the English language." In his address book Jackie Onassis sat next to an oryx herder, and in his prose he'd characteristically present himself talking to a priest while the man "knifed out the eye of a young guanaco...
...wake of his almost insolent success--first-time author at 38 and icon of literary chic by 41--it has proved as easy to demystify him as it was to crown him. "Only the bizarre or trifling really appeals to him," a school report had complained, and Chatwin habitually acted as if there was nothing wrong with the truth that a little storytelling couldn't fix. When he lost his notes in Africa, he reported that a family of monkeys had stolen them while he'd looked on, transfixed. When he contracted AIDS, he told even his closest friends that...