Word: turow
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...Turow were simply a well-to-do attorney who dabbled in literature, he would almost certainly be hovering still in the ranks of the unheralded and unsung. He regards himself as an unlikely candidate for the rewards he has received: "I don't think anybody betting would have bet on me. I certainly wouldn't have." This is not simply modesty but the recognition that his progress came by way of a number of steps that made no particular sense when he took them. There is a circular irony to Turow's triumph: he finally became what he had always...
...gynecologist on Chicago's North Shore, Turow inherited ambition early: "I grew up with a very successful father, whose success I knew I'd be expected to emulate." His early years were spent in what he describes as "a nouveau-riche Jewish ghetto" filled with returned World War II veterans eager to get ahead; he recalls the "sense of identity" he got from that ethnic community and the loss he felt when, at age 13, his parents moved further north to the wealthy and Waspish suburb of Winnetka...
...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...