Word: turow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...were neither amused nor encouraging. "My mother wanted to protect me from the fabled anguish of the literary life. She said I could be a doctor and write on the side, like Chekhov and William Carlos Williams." No sale. At Amherst College in the hubbub of the counterculture '60s, Turow became more rebellious still. During his freshman year, he and 22 other students marched against Army recruiters on campus; all promptly lost their student draft deferments. Turow eventually received a 1-Y permanent deferment because of a chronic anemic condition...
...academic front, Turow was a dedicated free spirit. "I wasn't a great student," he says. "I was nominally an English major. I was trying to figure out how to become a novelist. I wrote a lot, and I read a lot." He recalls "drinking in" Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet and being "overwhelmed by" Robert Stone's first novel, A Hall of Mirrors. He also fell under the influence of a visiting teacher, the short-story writer Tillie Olsen. "She took me seriously as a writer, and I'm enormously grateful...
While at Amherst, Turow had two stories accepted by the Transatlantic Review ; also, during a Christmas break back home, he had a blind date with Annette Weisberg, an art major at the University of Illinois and a near neighbor whom he had never met before. With graduation approaching, he was offered a fellowship to study creative writing at Stanford. "What was the alternative? A job!" So to the dismay of four parents, he and Annette set out for California...
Among other lessons, his four years at Stanford taught Turow the charms of the bourgeois life he thought he had rejected. "True student poverty," with its balancing of stipends, food stamps and unemployment benefits, he found difficult to take. "The only fight about money that Annette and I ever had was over a $6 pot she bought at an art auction." In addition, California life-styles in the early 1970s made Turow realize that he was more conventional than he had thought. "It was unbelievable," he remembers. "There was incessant drinking and substance abuse, and marriages were falling apart...
...Some of Turow's irritability stemmed from the recognition that his writing was going nowhere. In spite of his gratitude to helpful professors -- part of his earnings from Presumed Innocent went to endow a fellowship at Stanford -- he felt stymied by "academic values about literature, the sense that books could be appreciated only by a priesthood. I thought that a great novel could be read as well by a bus driver as by an English professor. It was not a popular view." He was also convinced that no great novels would be written by him. "It finally dawned...