Richard McKenna

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Richard Milton McKenna (born May 9, 1913 in Mountain Home , Idaho ; died November 1, 1964 in Chapel Hill , North Carolina ) was an American writer and sailor.

Life

McKenna was the son of Milton Lewis McKenna and Anna Lucy, nee Ertz. He was the oldest of four brothers in an impoverished family. When he was 14 years old, his father had disappeared, the family had been driven from the small farm and temporarily lived in a tent. Future prospects in a desert town in western Idaho during the Great Depression were not good and so McKenna joined the US Navy at 18 after high school when he could not afford the $ 50 tuition fees after a year of college , where He first made a medical training from 1931 and was assigned to a hospital in Bremerton in Washington State . However, he wanted to go to sea and so began in 1933 as a machine mate on a naval freighter. He later served on a gunboat on the Yangtze River for two years , then on a troop carrier in World War II and on a destroyer in the Korean War .

Most recently, he was a machine mate with the rank of Chief Petty Officer (CPO). After retiring from the Navy in 1953, he was able to study literature and creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill due to the GI Bill , where he graduated with honors in 1956 and received an honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa . During his studies he met the university librarian Eve Mae Grice, whom he married in 1956.

After finishing his studies McKenna became a freelance writer. In September 1958, a first story appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction , which is also considered his best. Casey Agonistes tells of a group of soldiers suffering from tuberculosis who resignedly wait for their end in the isolation ward of a hospital. One of the terminally ill, however, looks cheerful and finally says that he imagines a monkey named Casey and laughs at its pranks and performance. By the way, you can learn to visualize the monkey, and soon everyone in the group will see the monkey hopping around and making fun of the doctor or the hated head nurse. The communal hallucination becomes an ally in helping to achieve the goal, which is death.

McKenna wrote other stories that are attributed to science fiction and fantasy and which largely appeared posthumously . The volume Casey Agonistes and Other Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories contains a first selection of the collected stories. The volume The Left-Handed Monkey Wrench contains further stories from the estate as well as essays and fragments.

McKenna's great success, however, was the novel The Sand Pebbles (German Die Sandjacken ), which appeared in 1962 and for which he was awarded the Harper Prize endowed with 10,000 dollars . The book was on the New York Times bestseller list for 28 weeks , was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, and was selected by the Book of the Month Club . The film rights sold for over $ 200,000, and Robert Wise 's version of Gunboat on the Yangtze River, starring Steve McQueen, was released in 1966, received nine Golden Globes and was nominated for eight Academy Awards. The novel processes McKenna's two-year service on a gunboat on the Yangtze River, but the period of the plot is about 10 years before McKenna's service in China. The protagonist of the novel is Jake Holman, who is new to Sandjacken , the crew of the San Pablo , an ancient gunboat from the time of the Spanish-American War . The outsider and loner finds it difficult at first, but eventually finds a relationship with the team, with the strange country and even the love of a Christian missionary. But all of this is questioned and put to the test when civil war breaks out in China .

In 1964 McKenna died of a heart attack at the age of 51. His estate is in the University of North Carolina's Southern Historical Collection .

Awards

  • 1963: Harper Prize for the novel The Sand Pebbles
  • 1967: Nebula Award (posthumously) for the short story The Secret Place

bibliography

novel
  • The Sand Pebbles (1962)
    • German: Die Sandjacken. Translated by Paul W. Schultz. Lichtenberg-Verlag, Munich 1964. New edition as: The gunboat from the Yangtse-Kiang. Goldmann-Taschenbuch # 3532, 1977, ISBN 3-442-03532-5 .
Collections
  • New Eyes for Old: Nonfiction Writings by Richard McKenna (1972)
  • Casey Agonistes and Other Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories (1973)
  • The Left-Handed Monkey Wrench (1984)
Short stories
  • Casey Agonistes (1958)
    • German: dying is not easy. In: Anthony Boucher (Ed.): 16 Science Fiction Stories. Heyne (Heyne Anthologies # 5), 1964.
  • The Fishdollar Affair (1958)
  • The Night of Hoggy Darn (1958)
  • Love and Moondogs (1959)
  • Mine Own Ways (1960)
  • Hunter, Come Home (1963)
    • English: The forest of the Phytos. In: Charlotte Winheller (Ed.): Signals from Pluto. Heyne (Heyne General Series # 248), 1963.
  • The Secret Place (1966)
  • King's Horsemen (1967)
  • Fiddler's Green (1967)
    • German: The blessed fields. In: Damon Knight (Ed.): Damon Knight's Collection 2. Fischer Taschenbuch (Fischer Orbit # 3), 1972, ISBN 3-436-01490-7 .
  • Home the Hard Way (1967)
  • Bramble Bush (1968)
  • They Are Not Robbed (1968)
    • German: The Star Birds. In: Wulf H. Bergner (ed.): Flight into the past. Heyne SF&F # 3131, 1968.
  • Unclear Call for Lee (1971)
  • Church Party (1984)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ June 1939 to March 1941 on board the Luzon (PG-21).
  2. ↑ USS Gold Star (AK-12).
  3. ↑ USS Van Valkenburgh (DD-656).
  4. ↑ Richard M. McKenna Papers , accessed May 16, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME McKenna, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McKenna, Richard Milton (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and sailor
DATE OF BIRTH May 9, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Mountain Home , Idaho
DATE OF DEATH November 1, 1964
Place of death Chapel Hill , North Carolina