Dreamer's Journey The Life and Writings of Frederic Prokosch

In an effort remarkable for its intensity and duration, the Wisconsin-born poet and novelist Frederic Prokosch sought to cast his life into a hopeless riddle and ensure that no one saw his full face. This study is the first to separate the man from the distortions that surround him and provide a window into the wishes and fears behind his writings. Prokosch was a writer of striking and original gifts. The publication of The Asiatics in 1935 was greeted by the fanfare of trumpets. His rise was dazzling. The author of seventeen novels, which typically guide the reader through a sequence of dream-like events, and four collections of poems, many defined by a kind of surreal intensity, he garnered high praise from a galaxy of august admirers, including Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Andre Gide, Thornton Wilder, Albert Camus, Somerset Maugham, Lawrence Durrell, and I. B. Singer. He was named a Commander dans l'Order des Arts et Lettres by the French government in 1984 and awarded the Volterra Prize two years later. His novels have been translated into fifteen languages. In addition to discussing Prokosch's literary accomplishments, Dreamer's Journey offers an analysis of the dynamic relationship between his creative process and his penchant for lies and disguises. His novels, which he looked upon as extensions of his life, and in which he divides and diffuses himself among his characters, are, like the masks he donned in society, part of an effort to escape the unsatisfactory realities of his life, many of them caused by hostility to his homosexuality. Successful illusion, Prokosch had come to believe as a young man, is not only the essence of art but also of life itself. The exposure in 1972 of Prokosch's forgery of the "Butterfly Books" put a whole new complexion on his juggling of appearances. He expressed consternation but never remorse. A decade later, he reached new heights in reinventing his persona. Advertised as a record of his encounters with some of the century's most illustrious personalities, Voices: A Memoir is almost entirely fictitious and part of a gigantic hoax. Dreamer's Journey is based on a broad array of untapped archives as well as interviews and exchanges with more than three hundred persons---family members, classmates, editors, publishers, fellow writers, acquaintances, and lovers. The comments of many of these individuals, who spoke from both sympathetic and hostile viewpoints, shed light on the recesses of Prokosch's hidden life and resolved many of its mysteries. A kind of permanent expatriate, and a unique figure in American literature, Frederic Prokosch remains largely unknown in his own country.