Stewart O'Nan

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Stewart O'Nan (born February 4, 1961 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania ) is an American writer . He also publishes under the pen name James Coltrane .

Life

Stewart O'Nan first studied in Boston , worked as an aircraft engineer in Bethpage , New York, from 1984 to 1988 , then went to Cornell University , where he graduated in literature . He taught at the Universities of Central Oklahoma , New Mexico and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and finally moved to Avon, Connecticut in 1995 with his wife Trudy and their two children . Today he lives again in his native Pittsburgh.

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O'Nan's books deal with people from the American middle and lower classes. In doing so, he paints a picture of the United States, in which the “ American dream ” is usually nothing more than a chimera . His characters often have to hold their own against strokes of fate, and the stories he tells are almost always about "loss" and how each individual comes to terms with it. This topic was already dominated by his first novel Engel im Schnee , which was published in German and set in Butler , a small town in western Pennsylvania , in late autumn 1974 . The now grown-up Arthur Parkinson tells in two threads about the divorce of his parents and the associated loss of his father, and secondly about the failed marriage of his former babysitter, which leads to the fatal accident of her daughter Tara and ultimately her own death. For this book he received the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize in 1993 .

O'Nan is an extremely precise, attention to detail observer whose writing follows a maxim of the writer and literary critic John Gardner : “Describe a building as a man whose son has just been killed in the war sees it. Don't mention the son, the war, the death, or the old man who sees. ”While O'Nan initially wanted each of his books to be clearly different from the previous ones, this resolution will appear over time to take up less and less space. After his second novel The Speed ​​Queen , an extremely fast-paced book in which Margie Standiford, awaiting execution on death row, makes her life confession to be marketed by Stephen King , the "King of Horror", his books become superficial more and more leisurely and less eventful, while the real dramas increasingly take place in the mind of his characters. This is especially true of his novels Farewell to Chautauqua , Last Night , Emily Alone, and The Chance . But even in Halloween , which is about a fatal car accident involving several teenagers and begins with horror elements, it is ultimately about how the friends and relatives of the dead deal with the loss of loved ones.

The fascinating thing about O'Nan's books is the unreserved love of the author for his characters and the precision with which he describes their longings, hopes and disappointments. This becomes particularly clear in the two novels Farewell to Chautauqua and Quite Everyday People . In the first, he accompanies the three-generation Maxwell family for a week during their last summer home stay at Lake Chautauqua. In often short chapters, O'Nan devotes himself extensively to all nine people and even to the dog Rufus. By being able to look into the heads of the characters, the reader doesn't miss any of the family problems, while the individual characters usually try not to deal with them. Everyday people, on the other hand, offers us a panorama of life in a largely black neighborhood in Pittsburgh in the style of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio .

The literary non-fiction book Der Zirkusbrand is a bit out of the ordinary . Here O'Nan draws the largest circus fire in American history, which occurred in Hartford , Connecticut in 1944 , and the consequences of which continue to this day.

The film Engel im Schnee (2007) is based on his book of the same name.

In 2012 he wrote the story A Face in the Crowd with Stephen King .

Works (selection)

O'Nan and Stephen King are fans of the Boston Red Sox
  • 1987 Transmission. novel
  • 1993 In The Walled City. stories
  • 1994 Snow Angels . novel
  • 1996 The Names of the Dead . novel
  • 1997 The Speed ​​Queen . novel
  • 1998 A World Away . novel
  • 1999 A Good Day to Die. Novel. (As James Coltrane)
  • 1999 A Prayer for the Dying (novel)
    • The happiness of others. Übers. Thomas Gunkel. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2000, ISBN 3-498-05028-1
  • 2001 Everyday People (novel)
  • 2002 Wish You Were Here (novel)
    • Farewell to Chautauqua. Übers. Thomas Gunkel. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2005, ISBN 3-498-05034-6
  • 2003 The Night Country . novel
  • 2005 The Good Wife . novel
  • 2007 Last Night at the Lobster (novel)
  • 2008 Songs for the Missing (novel)
  • 2011 Emily, Alone (novel)
  • 2012 The Odds: A Love Story (novel)
  • 2015 West of Sunset: A Novel . Allen & Unwin, Sydney. ISBN 978-1-925-26609-2
  • 2016 City Of Secrets (novel)
  • 2019 Henry, Himself (novel)
Non-fiction
  • 2000 The Circus Fire
  • 2004 Faithful (baseball book, with Stephen King )

Radio plays

literature

  • Stewart O'Nan in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  • Ute Großkopf: The Good Wife (2005) , in: Dietmar Schloss, Heiko Jakubzik (Hrsg.): Twenty-two American novels from the new century: literary critical essays as an introduction . Trier: WVT, 2009 ISBN 978-3-86821-124-5 , pp. 213-222

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Short biography and reviews of works by James Coltrane at perlentaucher.de
  2. ↑ Wieland Freund : "The power of love, I guess" , interview, in: Literarisches Welt , July 26, 2014, p. 3
  3. ↑ “Working hard and failing in Hollywood” , Review Deutschlandradio Kultur , March 26, 2016
personal data
SURNAME O'Nan, Stewart
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH 4th February 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH Pittsburgh