Word: turow
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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...
...Things Are, involved, among other complications, a rent strike. "I realized that I knew nothing about the legal complexities of such an act," he says. "I also noticed that most of my friends, the people I had come to feel closest to at Stanford, were lawyers." As a lark, Turow decided to take the Law School Admission Test; he came back from the exam convinced he had made a fool of himself. In fact, he scored well enough to gain admission to Harvard and Yale law schools. He submitted The Way Things Are to some publishers and, as he expected...
...story could easily have ended here, and in a not very original way: another aspiring artist surrenders to the exigencies of the real world. But Turow's arrival at Harvard came with one of those little anomalies that inspire curious readers to turn the page. While explaining to his agent his decision to abandon literature, Turow had mentioned the possibility of someone's doing a nonfiction book about the experiences of first-year law students. He received a $4,000 contract to do just that. So he went to Harvard not only to study law but also, as he says...
After his grueling first nine months, Turow spent 14 equally grueling weeks in the summer turning his diaries into narrative form. One L was published just before his final year at Harvard. Some of his professors and classmates did not like the book -- and particularly their thinly disguised appearances in it -- but most reviewers were ecstatic. One L went on to sell some 40,000 copies in hardback and to become an underground, pass-along classic among law students. Turow confesses himself thrilled by "my first taste of literary success," but he was not swayed from the new path...