Jerome Klinkowitz

An iconic figure in American culture, Frank Lloyd Wright is famous throughout the world. Although his achievements in architecture are stunning, it is his importance in cultural history, Jerome Klinkowitz contends, that makes Wright the object of such avid and continuing interest. Designing more than just buildings, Wright offered a concept for living that still influences how people conduct their lives today. Wright's innovations in architecture have been widely studied, but this is the most comprehensive and sustained treatment of his thought. Klinkowitz presents a critical biography driven by the architect's own work and intellectual growth, focusing on the evolution of Wright's thinking and writings from his first public addresses in 1894 to his last essay in 1959. Did Wright reject all of Victorian thinking about the home, or do his attentions to a minister's sermon on "the house beautiful" deserve closer attention? Was Wright echoing the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or was he more in step with the philosophy of William James? Did he reject the Arts and Crafts movement, or repurpose its beliefs and practices for new times? And, what can be said of his deep dissatisfaction with architectural concepts of his own era, the dominant modernism that became the International Style? Even the strongest advocates of Frank Lloyd Wright have been puzzled by his objections to so much that characterized the twentieth century, from ideas for building to styles of living. In Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought, Klinkowitz, a widely published authority on twentieth-century literature, thought, and culture, examines the full extent of Wright's books, essays, and lectures to show how he emerged from the nineteenth century to anticipate the twenty-first. Outstanding Book, selected by the American Association of School Librarians Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers

Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought

Offers a profile of the American writer, discusses the main themes of each of his novels, and describes his place in modern literature

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few American writers since Mark Twain to have won and sustained a great popular acceptance while boldly introducing new themes and forms on the literary cutting edge. This is the "Vonnegut effect" that Jerome Klinkowitz finds unique among postmodernist authors. In this innovative study of the author's fiction, Klinkowitz examines the forces in American life that have made Vonnegut's works possible. Vonnegut shared with readers a world that includes the expansive timeline from the Great Depression, during which his family lost their economic support, through the countercultural revolt of the 1960s, during which his fiction first gained prominence. Vonnegut also explored the growth in recent decades of America's sway in art, which his fiction celebrates, and geopolitics, which his novels question. A pioneer in Vonnegut studies, Jerome Klinkowitz offers The Vonnegut Effect as a thorough treatment of the author's fiction-a canon covering more than a half century and comprising twenty books. Considering both Vonnegut's methods and the cultural needs they have served, Klinkowitz explains how those works came to be written and concludes with an assessment of the author's place in American fiction.

The Vonnegut Effect

Describes the background of Slaughterhouse-Five, discusses its themes, and looks at its critical reception

Reforming the Novel and the World

Slaughterhouse-five

Starting in the 1960s, a group of radically new fiction writers began having success at reinventing the novel and short story for postmodern times. Chief among them were Kurt Vonnegut, Jerzy Kosinski, Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, Clarence Major, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Although their work proved puzzling to reviewers and did not fit the conventions familiar to academic critics, these writers found an ally in a young reader named Jerome Klinkowitz. Hired to teach Hawthorne and other nineteenth-century figures, Klinkowitz found his deepest sympathies (and most lifelike affinities) to be with Vonnegut and company instead. Beginning in 1969 he published the first scholarly essays on Vonnegut, Kosinski, Barthelme, and the others in turn. By 1975 he was ready to write Literary Disruptions, a literary history of what he called this "post-contemporary" period. Since then he has written more than thirty books on contemporary fiction and its allied developments in cultural history, art, music, politics, and philosophy. Keeping Literary Company details Klinkowitz's work with these writers—not just researching their fiction and other publications, but introducing them to one another and taking part in the business-world activities that spread news of their innovations. He shows how what they wrote was so much a part of those turbulent times that a new literary generation found itself defined in such works as Slaughterhouse-Five, Being There, and Snow White. Here is a fascinating, first-person account of what these important figures wrote, how they wrote it, and what it means in the development of American fiction.

Working with Writers since the Sixties

Keeping Literary Company

“The novel is dead” was the cry of the 1960s, and so it was as an authoritative report concerning the world; but from that death, Klinkowitz argues, arose a form of writing that celebrates the crea­tive process, a narrative that is not about something but is something. Klinkowitz first characterizes the “modern” fiction of the earlier 20th cen­tury wherein the word fades into the background because the story line forms the essence of the fiction. Thus the word is “self-effacing.” Postmodern fiction, on the other hand, features the word. Words in postmodern fiction are opaque, not transparent. Of necessity we notice the word and must look closely at it; thus the word becomes “self-apparent.”

Fiction as Language/language as Fiction

The Self-apparent Word

John L. Somer

Examines the major works, personality, literary technique, and widespread appeal of the dynamic American writer.

The Vonnegut Statement

Donald L. Lawler

A collection of essays examine Kurt Vonnegut's life and work, with a complete bibliography of works by and about Vonnegut and a photo album of his life.

An Introduction to the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut in America

A witty, intelligent, first-person account of what Kurt Vonnegut, Jerzy Kosinski, Donald Barthelme, and other important writers of the last three decades wrote, how they wrote it, and what it means for the development of American fiction.

Philip F. Gura

Robert S. Levine

Nina Baym

Wayne Franklin

Shorter

The Making of a Post-contemporary American Fiction

Literary Disruptions

Asa B. Pieratt

Julie Huffman-klinkowitz

Kurt Vonnegut, a Comprehensive Bibliography

James Knowlton

In 1966, Peter Handke disturbed the world of German letters with the publication of his first novel and with his attacks on the complacency of German-language writers and their audiences. Since then, Handke—an Austrian whose works include drama, poetry, and critical theory as well as fiction—has become a leading European figure in the internationally established postmodern movement. Klinkowitz and Knowlton survey Handke's progress as a writer, concentrating on his novels, to determine whether his creativity has been exhausted by his persistent assault on the systems that underlie conventional fiction, drama, and poetry. By placing Handke's work in the tradition of Gabriel García Márquez's magic realism and Donald Barthelme's innovative fictions, the authors demonstrate that postmodern writers can create works of art in which content is effaced and the process of composition assumes increasing importance. Indeed, in so doing, Handke has made that process as humanly interesting and as fictionally dramatic as any stories of The Great Tradition: he has learned to address the human condition within the limits of a rebellious aesthetic. The lesson of the postmodern transformation, Klinkowitz and Knowlton argue, is that the abstraction of content is not a loss; instead, it leads directly to the most essential human concerns.

The Goalie's Journey Home

Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation

HuffmanKlinkowitz, Julie

Bestselling authors, sensational lecturers, documentary filmmakers, amateur archaeologists, spies for FDR--Dana and Ginger Lamb led the life of Indiana Jones long before the movie icon was ever scripted. "We blaze the trail," Ginger said, "and the scientists follow." The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Ginger Lamb is the first biography of this captivating, entrepreneurial couple. In southern California, they started married life in 1933 by building a canoe. With only $4.10 in their pockets, they paddled to Central America and through the Panama Canal. Three years later they returned triumphant, bearing a photographic record of the amazing trek that made them famous. After releasing their bestselling book, Enchanted Vagabonds, the two became exactly that. They relentlessly lectured for the public and mooned for the media until they were able to fund more exotic voyages to remote jungles and rivers. So convincing were they on the circuit that their most powerful fan, President Franklin Roosevelt, coerced J. Edgar Hoover into hiring the Lambs as spies in Mexico. After World War II, they launched their Quest for the Lost City, which yielded another book and documentary. Drawing on historical records, the Lambs' books and letters, and recently declassified espionage documents, biographers Julie Huffman-klinkowitz and Jerome Klinkowitz show how the Lambs succeeded in marketing their conquests and films to armchair explorers around the world and how they became, in popular imagination, the quintessential American adventurers.

The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Ginger Lamb

Critics were confused by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He was weird. Anyone who wrote science fiction could not be profound. They hated to admit they dug Vonnegut, especially since they could not understand him.

Bestselling authors, sensational lecturers, documentary filmmakers, amateur archaeologists, spies for FDR—Dana and Ginger Lamb led the life of Indiana Jones long before the movie icon was ever scripted. “We blaze the trail,” Ginger said, “and the scientists follow.” The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Ginger Lamb is the first biography of this captivating, entrepreneurial couple. In southern California, they started married life in 1933 by building a canoe. With only $4.10 in their pockets, they paddled to Central America and through the Panama Canal. Three years later they returned triumphant, bearing a photographic record of the amazing trek that made them famous. After releasing their bestselling book, Enchanted Vagabonds, the two became exactly that. They relentlessly lectured for the public and mooned for the media until they were able to fund more exotic voyages to remote jungles and rivers. So convincing were they on the circuit that their most powerful fan, President Franklin Roosevelt, coerced J. Edgar Hoover into hiring the Lambs as spies in Mexico. After World War II, they launched their Quest for the Lost City, which yielded another book and documentary. Drawing on historical records, the Lambs' books and letters, and recently declassified espionage documents, biographers Julie Huffman-klinkowitz and Jerome Klinkowitz show how the Lambs succeeded in marketing their conquests and films to armchair explorers around the world and how they became, in popular imagination, the quintessential American adventurers.

If, as the literary theorists of postmodernism contend, "content" does not exist, then how can fiction continue to be written? Jerome Klinkowitz, himself a veteran practitioner and theorist of fiction, addresses this question in Structuring the Void, an account of what today's novelists and short story writers do when they produce a fictive work. Klinkowitz focuses on the ways in which writers, finding themselves in the same position as abstract painters and death-of-God theologians, have turned their inquiry itself into subject matter, and he shows how this approach has in recent years produced something more than mere metafictive self-questioning. With no subject to structure, the writers Klinkowitz discusses nonetheless persist in the act of structuring. For Kurt Vonnegut, this has meant finding a form for an otherwise unrepresentable world by organizing his autobiography as a narrative device. In the generation following Vonnegut, Max Apple makes a similar move in the ritualization of a national history and popular culture, while Gerald Rosen and Rob Swigart invent a style of literary comedy based on their comic response to a new imaginative state, the state of California. Klinkowitz also considers subjects that, though they cannot be represented, nevertheless exercise constraints on a writer's intention to structure. In recent decades, two of these pressing themes have been gender (as seen here in the works of Grace Paley) and war (the Vietnam conflict itself as well as the struggles of two generations to come to terms with it). Structuring the void left when content collapses, these writers have, as Klinkowitz demonstrates, developed an entirely new style of fiction, one that necessarily privileges space over time and self-invention over representation.

The Struggle for Subject in Contemporary American Fiction

Structuring the Void

Offering close readings and insightful criticism of Vonnegut's three major works of nonfiction, his many uncollected pieces, and his unique manner of public speaking, Klinkowitz explains how Vonnegut's personal visions developed into a style of great public responsibility that mirrored the growth of his fiction.

The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction

Vonnegut in Fact

Best-selling authors, sensational lecturers, documentary filmmakers, amateur archaeologists, spies for FDR - Dana and Ginger Lamb led the life of Indiana Jones long before the movie icon was ever scripted. "We blaze the trail," Ginger said, "and the scientists follow." The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Gingar Lamb is the first biography of this captivating, entrepreneurial couple. In Southern California, they started married life in 1933 by building a canoe. With only $4.10 in their pockets, they paddled to Central America and through the Panama Canal. Three years later they returned triumphant, bearing the photographic record of the amazing trek that made them famous. After releasing their best-selling book, Enchanted Vagabonds, the two became exactly that. They relentlessly lectured for the public and postured for the media until they were able to fund more exotic voyages to remote jungles and rivers. So convincing were they on the circuit that their most powerful fan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, coerced J. Edgar Hoover into hiring the Lambs as spies in Mexico. After World War II they launched their Quest for the Lost City, which yielded another book and documentary. Other escapades, no less thrilling or marketable, filled the remainder of their astonishing lives. The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Ginger Lamb argues that the Lambs were geniuses of popular entertainment and the precursors to Animal Planet, the Travel Channel, and numerous documentary-format television shows. Drawing on historical records, the Lambs' books and letters, and recently declassified espionage documents, biographers Julie Huffman-klinkowitz and Jerome Klinkowitz show how the Lambs succeeded in marketing their conquests and films to armchair explorers around the world and how they became, in popular imagination, the quintessential American adventurers.

Jerome Klinkowitz

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