Russell Banks was born on this day in 1940, and Nelson Algren was born on this day in 1909. In his Foreward to a recent edition of Algren’s Take a Walk on the Wild Side, Banks describes his first encounter with Algren, who came to offer fatherly protection, encouragement and example all at once: I was a 23-year-old pipefitter in Concord, N.H., who hadnt gone to college but had written a novel that, despite a few striking paragraphs here and there, was quite simply awful. I took off work for a week and lugged my manuscript to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, where Algren was on the staff, more or less…. He read my manuscript, as he was paid to do, quickly located those few striking paragraphs and pointed them out to me and made it clear that I was supposed to do the rest myself (and what more can an apprentice writer ask of a master, anyhow?). But meanwhile, he said, since I had wheels and we were stuck up here on this mountain surrounded by writers drinking sherry with their little fingers in the air, and since he, like Jack Kerouac, didnt drive, why didnt I take him to Middlebury for a beer and then maybe wed go on to visit his pal Paul Goodman, who had a summer place somewhere nearby? We did, and that was the end of my tour at Bread Loaf, more or less.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 11:50:28 +0000
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