A short life of the author
Harold Brodkey (1930–1996) was born Harold Roy Weintraub on 25 October 1930 in Staunton, Illinois. He was adopted after his mother’s death. He studied at Harvard and was a long-time New Yorker contributor.
Life and Career
First Love and Other Sorrows (1957) — his debut story collection — earned immediate comparisons to Proust. For the next three decades, Brodkey published stories in The New Yorker and Esquire while working on a vast autobiographical novel that became legendary for its ambition and its endlessly delayed publication.
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988) — a major collection — confirmed that his short fiction was among the most formally ambitious in American literature. The stories are extraordinarily long, densely textured, and concerned with the minute registration of consciousness.
The Runaway Soul (1991) — the long-awaited novel — was 835 pages of autobiographical fiction about growing up in the Midwest. It was both praised and attacked: praised for its prose, attacked for its self-indulgence.
Major Works and Themes
Brodkey wrote about consciousness, memory, childhood, and the act of perception. His prose is dense, Proustian, and built on the accumulation of sensory detail.
Key Works
- Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988)
- The Runaway Soul (1991)
Collecting Brodkey
First Love and Other Sorrows first edition (Dial Press, 1957) brings $50–$100. Brodkey died of AIDS in 1996 and wrote about his illness in This Wild Darkness (1996).