Word: edel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...storyteller is Leon Edel, 69, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his monumental biography of Henry James (2,152 pages in five volumes). He has also edited two volumes in a series of James' letters as well as his collected plays. A longtime (1949-72) professor at New York University, where he held the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters, Edel is now teaching in a post-retirement position at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. But he journeyed to Dartmouth for the summer session, a regular academic term...
...Edel's offering is called, broadly, "Understanding Biography." But the two-hour class each Tuesday and Thursday morning is really the occasion for an extemporaneous review of Edel's own discoveries. "Any academic can set up his shingle and be a literary critic," says Edel to his T-shirted students. "But biography is more difficult; it involves vast archives." On the other hand, he dismisses-with a downward sweep of his arms-documentary biographers who limit themselves to a recitation of facts. Says he: "The only imagination allowed is over form, not facts, but that imagination...
During the time chronicled in these notebooks (expertly edited by Leon Edel), Wilson was merely Bunny Wilson, a bright, pompous young writer among other writers in Greenwich Village. He supported himself with work at Vanity Fair, where the staff sometimes played a game with the secretaries called "The Rape of the Sabine Women," and later became an associate editor of the more staid New Republic. By day, he reviewed the best of his contemporaries. After hours, he saw them not quite at their best: E.E. Cummings lying in a bathtub maliciously imitating John Dos Passes' speech impediment; Dorothy Parker...
...letters to Pritchett, Greene said, "one of the major objects of his craft (I speak, of course, of the novelist) is the awakening of sympathy." He demonstrates that same kind of sympathy in Lord Rochester's Monkey but it is overbearing. And as Leon Edel says in his book Literary Biography, "There enters into the process a quality of sympathy with the subject which is neither forbearance nor adulation." Edel describes a certain form of the biographical genre that, in its rejection of chronological order, can "borrow from the methods of the novelist without, however, being fiction." Here again Greene...
...product is a massive march of minutiae organized by no other apparent guiding force than chronology. Blotner adheres slavishly to "the inexorable tick of the clock" that Edel urged biographers to avoid at all costs. The chapter headings, "Dec., 1918--September, 1919/September, 1919--June, 1920...," are almost selfparodies of Blotner's conception of biography...