A short life of the author
Vance Nye Bourjaily (17 September 1922 – 31 August 2010) was an American novelist who arrived in American letters with enormous promise — his first novel, The End of My Life (1947), was greeted as a major debut, and Norman Mailer, reviewing the postwar literary landscape, ranked Bourjaily as the best of the new novelists. He published six novels over four decades, co-founded the influential literary magazine discovery, and taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for nearly twenty years. Yet he never achieved the sustained reputation that his contemporaries — Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, Updike — secured, and by the time of his death in 2010 he was largely forgotten. His career is one of the most instructive cases of mid-century American literary promise unfulfilled — or, more accurately, of promise that was fulfilled in books that the culture simply stopped reading.
Life
Bourjaily was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Monte Ferris Bourjaily, a Lebanese-American journalist, and Barbara Webb, a writer. He grew up in Virginia and attended Bowdoin College before leaving to serve in the U.S. Army during World War II. He saw combat in Europe, an experience that shaped his first novel and much of his subsequent work.
After the war, he co-founded discovery, a literary magazine that published early work by Mailer, Flannery O’Connor, Herbert Gold, and others. He was briefly a literary sensation — young, handsome, connected to the New York literary world, and the author of a well-received war novel. He married and settled on a farm in Iowa, where he began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the late 1950s. He was an influential teacher — his students included John Irving and others — and he remained at Iowa until 1980.
He was also a passionate outdoorsman — a hunter, fisherman, and farmer — and his non-fiction about hunting and country life, collected in The Unnatural Enemy (1963) and Country Matters (1973), reveals a side of his temperament that his urban literary friends found baffling.
The Novels
The End of My Life (1947) is a war novel about a group of young Americans in the ambulance service during World War II — their idealism, their disillusionment, and the moral damage of combat. The novel was compared favourably to Hemingway and Dos Passos and was praised for its emotional honesty.
The Hound of Earth (1955) is a novel about a nuclear scientist who goes underground after the bombing of Hiroshima — a Cold War fugitive narrative that anticipates the paranoid fiction of the 1960s.
The Violated (1958) is Bourjaily’s most ambitious novel — a multi-character, multi-perspective narrative that attempts to capture the full scope of American life in the postwar decade. The book was praised by some critics as a major work and dismissed by others as overreaching. Its formal ambition — shifting perspectives, fragmented chronology, a large cast — was ahead of its time but did not find a wide readership.
Confessions of a Spent Youth (1960) is a picaresque autobiographical novel. The Man Who Knew Kennedy (1967) uses the Kennedy assassination as the centrepiece of a novel about American political disillusionment.
Brill Among the Ruins (1970) is generally considered Bourjaily’s finest novel — a story of an American lawyer in Oaxaca, Mexico, during the Day of the Dead, confronting his failures and his mortality. The novel won the National Book Award nomination and is a mature, controlled work of considerable power.
Why He Was Forgotten
Bourjaily’s disappearance from the American literary canon is instructive. His novels are intelligent, well-crafted, and seriously engaged with American experience. But they lack the singular stylistic signature — the unmistakable voice — that sustains literary reputation over time. Bourjaily was a very good novelist, but he was not a great one in the sense that demands continued reading. He also published too infrequently and moved too often between modes and subjects to build a cumulative readership.
His teaching career may also have worked against his reputation — the Iowa Writers’ Workshop produced students who became more famous than their teacher, and Bourjaily’s critical stock declined as the literary culture’s attention shifted to newer voices.
Collecting Bourjaily
The End of My Life (1947, Scribner’s) in first edition with dust jacket brings $50–$150. Brill Among the Ruins (1970, Dial Press) brings $20–$50. Other novels bring $10–$30. Bourjaily’s books are underpriced relative to their quality — a genuine bargain for collectors of mid-century American fiction. Signed copies are scarce.