Vance Bourjaily

Vance (Nye) Bourjaily (born September 17, 1922 in Cleveland , Ohio , USA; † August 31, 2010 in Greenbrae , California , USA) was an American journalist, writer and writer of plays and TV episodes.

Life

Vance Bourjaily was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1922 as the second eldest of the three sons of Monte I Ferris Bourjaily (1894–1979) and his first wife Barbara (née Webb). His father's family came from Lebanon. Ferris Bourjaily, the grandfather of Vance B., immigrated to the USA from Kteleh in Lebanon at the beginning of the 20th century. Vance's father (Monte I Ferris Bourjaily) worked as a journalist and later rose to become editor of the United Features Syndicate .

Vance Bourjaily spent the youth together with his two brothers, Monte II Mansour B. (* April 14, 1921 - January 4, 2005) and Paul Webb B. (* 1925), in Connecticut , Virginia and New York . After graduating from John Handley High School in Winchester , Virginia in 1939 , he attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick , Maine .

After the USA entered World War II, Bourjaily volunteered for the American Field Service and was used for transporting the wounded in Syria , Egypt and Italy from 1942 to 1944 . He then volunteered for the US Army and fought as an infantryman in the Pacific theater of war. The experiences of the war shaped him significantly and were repeatedly the focus of his later literary works.

After the end of the war Bourjaily first returned to Bowdoin College and graduated from it in 1947 with a BA . He worked at the San Francisco Chronicle before moving to New York City in 1950. From 1953 to 1955 he gave the 6 times / p. a. published literary magazine Discovery . Articles appeared in the magazine. a. by Saul Bellow , Bernard Malamud , Norman Mailer , William Styron , Adrienne Rich , Wayne Booth and John Hollander .

After Discovery ended , he wrote for The Village Voice , founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer.

Bourjaily's first novel, The End of My Life , was published as early as 1947. It was heavily influenced by his harrowing war experiences and made him famous overnight. Writer and literary critic John W. Aldridge wrote with praise in his book After The Lost Generation (1951):

“Since F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel This Side of Paradise , not a single book has so aptly described the feelings of young people in times of war, and no book since Ernest Hemingway's In Another Land has so perfectly documented the loss these young people suffered in the war . "

With his following novels Bourjaily could not build on his early success.

For more than two decades (1958–1980), Bourjaily taught creative writing at one of the most famous American writers 'workshops , the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa - at times together with his friends Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut - up-and-coming talented writers, who were largely unknown until then. Among his students were u. a. John Irving and TC Boyle .

In 1980 he moved to the writing faculty at the University of Arizona . From 1985 until his retirement in 1992 he was director of the graduate program in creative writing at Louisiana State University . In 1989, Bourjaily was honored by LSU with the title of Boyd Professor for his outstanding teaching work.

Vance Bourjaily fell into a coma after falling and died shortly afterwards at the age of 87 in Greenbrae.

Private

In 1946 Bourjaily married Bettina Yensen. The couple had three children: daughter Anne * 1952 died in a car accident in 1964; Son Philip * 1958 and daughter Robin * 1965. The marriage was divorced in the mid-80s and Bourjaily married Yasmin Mogul for the second time in 1985, with whom he had a son (Omar * 1983).

Works

Novels

• The End of My Life. New York, Scribner, 1947; London, WH Allen, 1963.
• The Hound of Earth. New York, Scribner, 1955; London, Secker and Warburg, 1956.
• The Violated. New York, Dial Press, 1958; London, WH Allen, 1962.
• Confessions of a Spent Youth. New York, Dial Press, 1960; London, WH Allen, 1961.
• The Man Who Knew Kennedy. New York, Dial Press, and London, WH Allen, 1967.
• Brill among the Ruins. New York, Dial Press, 1970; London, WH Allen, 1971.
• Now Playing in Canterbury. New York, Dial Press, 1976.
• A Game Men Play. New York, Dial Press, 1980.
• The Great Fake Book. New York, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987.
• Old Soldier. New York, Fine, 1990.

Short stories

• The Poozle Dreamers, in Dial (New York), fall 1959.
• Fractional Man, in New Yorker, August 6, 1960.
• Goose Pits, in New York, November 25, 1961.
• Varieties of Religious Experience, in The Esquire Reader, edited by Arnold Gingrich and others. New York, Dial Press, 1967.
• A Lover's Mask, in Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), May 6, 1967.
• The Amish Farmer, in Great Esquire Fiction, edited by L. RustHills. New York, Viking Press, 1983.
• The Duchess, in Stand One, edited by Michael Blackburn, JonSilkin, and Lorna Tracy. London, Gollancz, 1984.

Plays

• $ 4000: An Opera in Five Scenes, music by Tom Turner (produced Iowa City, 1969). Published in North American Review (Cedar Falls, Iowa), Winter 1969.

Other

• The Girl in the Abstract Bed (cartoon lyrics). New York, TiberPress, 1954.
• The Unnatural Enemy. New York, Dial Press, 1963.
• Country Matters: Collected Reports from the Fields and Streams of Iowa and Other Places. New York, Dial Press, 1973.
• Fishing by Mail: The Outdoor Life of a Father and Son, with Philip Bourjaily. New York, Atlantic Monthly, 1993.
• Discovery 1-6. New York, Pocket Books, 6 vols., (Editor) 1953–1955.

Web links

• Obituary in the New York Times (+ photo)
• Obituary in the Washington Post
• Bowdoin College, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Vance Bourjaily Papers, 1942-1984
• familytrees.genopro.com - Genealogical information about the Bourjaily family
• Vance Bourjaily in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Muse Upon My Shoulders. Discussions of the Creative Process. Edited by Sylvia Skaggs McTague. 2004. Here pp. 77-90: A Conservation with Vance Bourjaily.
2. ^ Homepage of The Village Voice
3. ↑ "No book since F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise has caught so well the flavor of youth in wartime, and no book since Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms has contained so complete a record of the loss of that youth in war." ( Vance Bourjaily, novelist Exploring Postwar America, this at 87 . In: The New York Times . September 3, 2010)
4. ↑ University of Iowa - College of Liberal Arts & Sciences - Writers Workshop - Homepage ( Memento of the original from May 2, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ List of Boyd Professors at Louisiana State University ( Memento of the original from August 26, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ^ Philip A. Greasley (Ed.): Dictionary of Midwestern-Literature. Vol. 1. The Authors. Indiana University Press, 2001