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Author Profiles

Its freewheeling language and design, too, set Augie and Bellow off from Gatsby and Fitzgerald. Gatsby, steeped in modernist pessimism, is an exquisitely compact tale of the American dream gone sour; Augie March is a sprawling, defiantly optimistic picaresque. Yet Bellow, with his strange new mix of erudition and big-city colloquialism, was no less a stylist than Fitzgerald or Hemingway.

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“Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint,” Algren wrote in City on the Make, “you have to love it a little while.” Liebling clearly thought otherwise. From the get-go, his look at Chicago was down his nose. 

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Take a real time and place, and a real type of people, let the imagination go to work on them, and create your own complex, enduring myths. Myths not just of Albany, but America itself in microcosm. It’s an approach that demands a gut-thorough understanding of the history of one’s place, and Kennedy is fortunate to have had his seep in like it did.

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Harrison’s poetry abounds with images from northern Michigan. Not so his fiction, most of which is set in places he has traveled to rather than the place he lives. Harrison is a place-oriented writer who can and does write accurately about many places. He disdains regionalism. “A writer’s just a writer,” he says, bumping along a gravel road in his Landcruiser, “and anytime a writer gets buried in regionalism or ethnic background he’s making a mistake. He has to stay free of all entanglements like that.”

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Like many writers, Richler is quiet in person, almost shy, as if he saves all his hell-raising and showing off for the printed page. He responds to questions politely, but rarely at much length, and asks nearly as many as he answers. When I ask whether he is often recognized around the city, he replies, “Sometimes,” then quickly changes the subject, recalling with a laugh how perplexed Montrealers were in 1973 when they learned that a feature film was being made from The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

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“Chicago, if I were to explain it to an outsider, in contrast to other cities like New York or New Orleans or San Francisco — they’re called the storied cities, these three cities, and they’re supposed to have social graces. Chicago never had that. Chicago is what I call a horny-handed city, a city of hands. A city of building and construction, heavy industry, the stockyards at the time. At the time. There’s no stockyards today, but at the time Chicago was known — ‘hog butcher of the world.‘ And so they came — that is, ‘they’ meaning from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as blacks from the South — to work in the yards. They came to work in the steel mills; they came to work in the farm-equipment plants, railroads, heavy industry. It was a city of hands.”

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