Word: rockland
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This summer I am working in bucolic Westchester County and live across the Tappan Zee Bridge in Rockland County. Although the long daily drive is not particularly treacherous, I began the summer ignorant of the commuting mores that now keep me safe...
Even without the upcoming tour, Morrison's life seems hectic. She rents an apartment near Princeton University in New Jersey, where since 1989 she has held a university chair in the humanities; another apartment in lower Manhattan; and a stone house in Rockland County, N.Y. Plus, she is having rebuilt the house she owned on the Hudson River just north of New York City, which burned to the ground on Christmas Day 1993. Three residences? Or four, counting the house in progress? "I was a child of the Depression," she shrugs and laughs. "I have bad dreams about eviction...
...fine day in 1972, an assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts drove to the city dump in Rockland, Mass., took 14 bulky typescripts out of his car and heaved them as far as he could into the trash. "I waited till the bulldozer came by and buried them," said George V. Higgins recently, recalling the scene with satisfaction. "And then I left...
...Higgins' first 14 novels have not risen from Rockland's slime to shame their creator. Most of them, he says, had shamed him already, by collecting thumbprints and rejection letters from virtually all the reputable publishing houses in New York City and Boston. What gave him the courage to deep-six such a large shelf of certifiably lame literature, however, was an acceptance. The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a gritty, amiably cynical tale about barroom lowlifes and courthouse small-timers in Massachusetts, had been bought by Knopf. Higgins prepared, at last, for overnight success. What followed showed why novel writing...
...sized following watches the bookstores and grabs whatever he writes on the first bounce -- to be able to quit his assistant U.S. Attorney post in 1973, and eventually to leave off the practice of law altogether. That year he published a superb second novel (16th, counting those in the Rockland dump) called The Digger's Game. If somebody isn't teaching this small marvel in writing classes, then U.S. education is in worse shape than we have been told. Probably not, though; there is an indictable villainy or two in the plot, and Higgins is pigeonholed, wrongly but irretrievably...