Word: engell
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FOUR YEARS AGO, in the 35th reunion book of the Harvard class of 1942, Monroe Engel gave the following account of himself: "I have continued to teach, write and take in various forms of nutrient." That, recounted in characteristic fashion, is indeed what he has done for most of the past quarter century. More specifically, he has taught creative writing at Harvard during those years and written creatively on his own. As a writer who teaches and a teacher who writes, Engel has lived on a plot of middle ground somewhere between his two professions. He has lived near Harvard...
...live there or the students who meet there once a week to talk about creative writing. The comfortable, lived-in part is the back, where current fiction (Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino) and current periodicals (The Paris Review, the Nation) lie about and are read. This is where Monroe Engel teaches, writes and, one presumes, takes his sundry nutrients...
...talks easily, and with a gentle grace; Engel lists "conversation" among the things he enjoys on the dust jacket of his new book. He has a crinkly smile and offers it frequently. He is not jolly, but a modern and friendly version of courtly. Speaking about his years at Harvard, Engel downplays the difficulty of teaching fiction and writing it at the same time. Scheduling problems, mostly. Students make large and immediate demands on his time, whereas the writing can always be put off. Further, there are "certain similarities of energies" required of writing and teaching, and he says...
Over the past two decades, he has seen considerable evolution in the subjects and styles of student writing. About ten years ago, for example, during the height of student political activism, Engel says students were much more "consciously literary" than they are now, producing more imitative work. "I had a sense then that students were reading to save their lives, reading with great intensity....The political nature of the time had something to do with it. There was a kind of urgency that there isn't now," he says. But since that tumultuous period, which he said had "the highest...
...SUBJECT Engel does not talk about with his creative writing classes is his own fiction. After graduations from Harvard in 1942 and the United States Army in 1945 (where he was a communications officer who landed on Omaha Beach three days after D-Day), Engel has been writing continually. He published his first novel, A Length of Rope, in 1952, followed it with The Vision of Nicholas Solon in 1959, and Voyager Belsky in 1962. In addition to the three novels there has been a book about Dickens, the result of his Ph.D dissertation, and an edited collection called...