Gerald Kersh

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Gerald Kersh (born August 26, 1911 in Teddington , Middlesex ; died November 5, 1968 in Kingston , New York ) was a British-American writer.

Life

Kersh was the son of master tailor Hyman Leon Kersh (born as Chaim Kerszenblat, 1877-1929) and his wife Leah, née Miller (1880-1962). He grew up in a secular Jewish environment with two older sisters in Teddington and Shepherd's Bush . In 1922 the family moved to Marylebone , London, and Kersh attended Christ Church School in Ealing and then studied on a scholarship at Regent Street Polytechnic from 1924 to 1928 . After the death of his father, he worked in various jobs and moved frequently.

In 1934 his first novel Jews Without Jehovah was published . The book was received positively by the critics, but some family members found themselves presented in an unfavorable light, sued the publisher and the book had to be withdrawn. His third novel Night And The City (1938) was then very successful and Kersh has been compared to contemporary American authors such as Dashiell Hammett , John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway . In the same year Kersh married Alice Thompson Rostron (1909-1986), but the marriage did not last.

During this time Kersh wrote numerous short stories and wrote for Courier Magazine , as its co-editor he appeared from 1937-1939. 1939 published I Got References , a collection of autobiographical narratives. After the war began in 1940, Kersh joined the Coldstream Guards and at the same time reported anonymously in the Daily Herald in the column The Private Life Of A Private about his training. These contributions then formed the basis for They Die With Their Boots Clean (1941), which, along with the sequel The Nine Lives Of Bill Nelson (1942), became one of the best-selling books on wartime. There was no combat mission because Kersh was buried during the Blitz and was subsequently classified as unsuitable. In addition to these books, he wrote texts for the BBC , the Ministry of Information and the Ealing Studios and wrote numerous articles for newspapers and magazines, often under pseudonyms. He wrote as Piers England for The People and as Waldo Kellar for John Bull .

In 1943, Kersh married Claire Alyne "Lee" Boyle, daughter of a Canadian politician. By the end of the war, Kersh wrote three other novels on the subject of war, namely The Dead Look On (1943) about the Lidice massacre , A Brain and Ten Fingers (1943) about the guerrilla war in Yugoslavia and Faces in a Dusty Picture (1944) about the war in North Africa. In addition, three story collections appeared, making Kersh one of the most prominent authors of the time. He obtained accreditation as a reporter and covered the landing in Normandy and the liberation of Paris . His experiences appeared collectively as Clean, Bright and Slightly Oiled (1946).

After the war, Kersh continued to write and had to continue to write, a combination of tax debts, deteriorating health, and a protracted and unfavorable divorce process that set the scene for the years to come. He bought a house in Barbados for $ 20,000, which burned down uninsured in 1949. He lived here and there, temporarily in Canada, to eventually become a US citizen. During this time The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (1950) was written about a little man in great difficulty who gradually sinks into the abyss of depressive paralysis.

In 1955 he married a third time. Florence Sochis had originally been a friend of his first wife and had looked after Kersh for a number of years. The couple lived in increasingly precarious circumstances in New York State and Kersh wrote the novel Fowlers End (1957) about a cunning and greedy movie theater owner in Soho , according to Anthony Burgess , "one of the best comic novels of the century, starring Sam Yudenow (almost) as great drawn like Falstaff “He wrote his last great novel The Angel and the Cuckoo (1966) while seriously ill with cancer. After a recurrence of his throat cancer, Kersh died impoverished in 1968 at the age of 57 at Horton Memorial Hospital in Middletown, New York.

Initially valued by critics and a bestselling author during the war years, Kersh's later novels and collections were largely ignored and out of print for decades. A lot has been reissued in recent years and several of his novels have been published in German translation.

bibliography

Novels
  • Jews Without Jehovah (1934)
  • Men Are So Ardent (1936)
  • Night And The City (1938, also as Dishonor , 1955,)
    • German: At night in the city. Translated by Ango Laina. Maas (Pulp master # 13), 2002, ISBN 3-929010-80-1 .
  • They Die With Their Boots Clean (1941)
  • The Nine Lives Of Bill Nelson (1942)
  • The Dead Look On (1943)
    • German: The dead watch. Translated by Ango Laina and Angelika Müller. Pulp master # 41, 2016, ISBN 978-3-927734-74-6 .
  • A Brain And Ten Fingers (1943)
  • Faces In A Dusty Picture (1944)
  • Sergeant Nelson Of The Guards (1945)
  • An Ape, A Dog And A Serpent (1945)
  • The Weak And The Strong (1945)
    • German: The weak and the strong. Translated by Elisabeth Pohr. Zsolnay, 1948.
  • Prelude To A Certain Midnight (1947)
    • German: Overture at midnight. Translated by Ango Laina and Angelika Müller. Pulp master # 24, 2009, ISBN 978-3-927734-38-8 .
  • The Song Of The Flea (1948)
  • The Thousand Deaths Of Mr Small (1950)
  • The Great Wash (1952, also called The Secret Masters , 1953)
  • Fowlers End (1957)
  • The Weak And The Strong (1959)
  • The Implacable Hunter (1961)
  • A Long Cool Day In Hell (1965)
  • The Angel And The Cuckoo (1966)
  • Brock (1969)
Collections
  • I Got References (1939)
  • Selected Stories (1943)
  • The Battle Of The Singing Men (1944)
  • The Horrible Dummy And Other Stories (1944)
  • Neither Man Nor Dog (1946)
  • Clean, Bright & Slightly Oiled (1946)
  • Sad Road To The Sea (1947)
  • Clock Without Hands (1949)
    • German: man without a face. Selected and translated by Peter Naujack. Diogenes Taschenbücher # 128, 1977, ISBN 3-257-20366-7 .
  • Brazen Bull (1952)
  • The Brighton Monster & Other Stories (1953)
  • Guttersnipe: Little Novels (1954)
  • Men Without Bones (1955)
  • On An Odd Note (1958)
  • The Ugly Face Of Love (1960)
  • The Best Of Gerald Kersh (1960)
  • Men Without Bones (1962)
  • The Terrible Wild Flowers (1962)
  • More Than Once Upon A Time (1964)
  • The Hospitality Of Miss Tolliver And Other Stories (1965)
  • Nightshade & Damnations (1987)
Short stories
  • The Devil That Troubled the Chessboard (1936)
  • Busto Is a Ghost, Too Mean to Give Us a Fright! (1938)
  • Comrade Death (1938)
  • Lunatic's Broth (1938, as PJ Gahagan)
  • The Drunk and the Blind (1938)
  • The Tarleton Twins (1938, as GJ Herbert)
  • The Old Burying Place ... (1938)
  • Slaves (1938)
  • The Earwig (1938)
  • Elizabeth and Temptation (1939, as GJ Herbert)
  • Hairy Cohen (1939)
  • The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy (1939)
  • Shaggy Yellow Dog (1939)
  • The Battle of the Singing Men (1939)
  • The Naked Man (1940)
  • A Ruby Worth Eleven Hundred Pounds (1940)
  • The Stone (1941, also as: The Beggars' Stone )
  • The Undefeated (1941)
  • Frozen Beauty (1941, as Waldo Kellar)
  • The Last Coin of Mr. Baer (1941, as Waldo Kellar)
  • The Bitter Seas (1942)
  • The Gentleman All in Black (1942)
  • Who Wants a Liver-Colored Cat? (1942)
  • Fantasy of a Hunted Man (1942)
  • The Evil Destiny of Dr. Polacek (1942, as Waldo Kellar)
  • The Ten Old Tigers (1942)
  • Bagpipes (1942)
  • Gratitude (1943)
  • Irongut and the Brown Mouse (1943)
  • A Bit of a Change (1943)
  • All That One Man Remembered (1943)
  • The White Flash (1943)
  • The Musicians (1944)
  • The Woman in the Mud (1944)
  • Doctor Ox Will Die at Midnight (1946)
  • In a Room Without Walls (1946)
  • Neither Man Nor Dog (1946)
  • Reflections in a Tablespoon (1946)
  • The Scene of the Crime (1946)
  • In a Misty Window (1946)
  • Clock Without Hands (1946)
  • Seed of Destruction (1947)
  • White Horse with Wings (1947)
  • Note on Danger B (1947)
    • German: Report about danger B. In: Science Fiction: Five Stories = Science Fiction: Five stories . dtv (dtv bilingual), 1976, ISBN 3-423-09061-8 .
  • The King Who Collected Clocks (1947)
  • The Epistle of Simple Simon (1947)
  • Voices in the Dust (1947, also as: Voices in the Dust of Annan )
  • Ladies or Clothes (1947)
  • The Monster (1948, also as: The Brighton Monster )
  • The Ape and the Mystery (1948)
  • The End of a Wise Guy (1948)
  • The Queen of Pig Island (1949)
  • The Copper Dahlia (1949)
  • The Terrible Ride of Colonel Tessier (1952)
  • Judas Forgiven (1953)
  • Wealth of Nations (1953)
  • Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo? (1953)
  • The Crewel Needle (1953)
  • The Dancing Doll (1954)
  • The Hack (1954)
  • The Madwoman (1954)
  • Thicker Than Water (1954)
  • Men Without Bones (1954)
  • The Sympathetic Souse (1954)
  • Buried Treasure (1955)
  • Carnival on the Downs (1955)
  • Femme Fatale (1955)
  • Incident in a Tavern (1955)
  • One Case in a Million (1955)
  • The Charcoal Burner (1955)
  • The Fabulous Fido (1955)
  • The Guardian (1955)
  • The Life and Times of the Dog Basta (1955)
  • The Violin Maker (1955)
  • The White-Washed Room (1955)
  • Memory of a Fight (1955)
  • The Eye (1957)
  • The Secret of the Bottle (1957, also as: The Oxoxoco Bottle )
  • Prophet Without Honor (1958)
  • River of Riches (1958)
  • The Terribly Wild Flowers (1958)
  • The Shady Life of Annibal (1959)
  • Teeth and Nails (1960)
  • A Deal In Overcoats (1960, also as: The Molosso Overcoats )
  • The Defeat of the Demon Tailor (1961)
  • The Unsafe Deposit Box (1962, also as: A Little Something in the Bank )
  • A Lucky Day for the Boar (1962)
  • Pride of Profession (1962)
  • Bone for Debunkers (1962)
  • A Bargain with Cashel (1963)
  • A Walk in the Snow (1964)
  • Fabulous Bargain (1964)
  • Greek Tragedy (1964)
  • Heartless Heidi (1964)
  • More Than Once Upon a Time (1964)
  • No Matter How You Slice It (1964)
  • Proud Servant (1964)
  • Return of the Dog (1964)
  • The Nimroud Rug (1964)
  • The Spanish Prisoner (1964)
  • The Tremendous Trifle (1964)
  • Somewhere Not Far from Here (1965)
  • The Truth About Orlik (1966)
  • Sad Road to the Sea (1967)
  • Some Other Star (2001)
  • A Legend of Truth (2006)
  • A Vision of a Lost Child (2006)
  • Kannibalsky (2006)
  • Miracle of the Winged Rescue (2006)
  • The Dungeon (2006)
  • The Man and the Spirit (2006)
  • The Wolf Dies in Silence (2006)
  • Wolf! Wolf! (2006)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ one of the best comic novels of the century, with Sam Yudenow as superb a creation (almost) as Falstaff . Quoted from Paul Duncan: Kersh, Gerald. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . Oxford University Press, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Kersh, Gerald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES England, Piers (pseudonym); Gahagan, PJ (pseudonym); Herbert, GJ (pseudonym); Kellar, Waldo (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-American writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 26, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Teddington , Middlesex
DATE OF DEATH 5th November 1968
Place of death Kingston , New York