Sorrentino, Gilbert

David Markson was born in Albany, New York, on December 20, 1927. He received his B.A. from Union College in 1950 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1952. He has written seven novels and a critical study.

Louis Mackey was known for his works on Kierkegaard, Saint Augustine and Medieval Philosophy. His published work also included literary criticism, literary theory, and inquiries into the relationship of literature to philosophy. He was especially interested in the works of Gilbert Sorrentino and Thomas Pynchon.

Chris Fishbach of Coffee House Press published these titles; Mel Berger of the William Morris Agency sent him the material.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Gilbert Sorrentino.” Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition. Ed. Susan Windisch Brown. Detroit: St. James Press, 1995. pp. 929-931. Lewis, Barry. “David Markson.” Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition. Ed. Susan Windisch Brown. Detroit: St. James Press, 1995. pp. 655-656. O’Brien, John. “Gilbert Sorrentino.” Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980. Detroit: Gale Research Co, 1980. pp. 310-314.

Gilbert Sorrentino was born on April 27, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Brooklyn College from 1950–1951. From 1951–1953, he left school to serve in the Army Medical Corps. After an abortive attempt at writing a novel, Sorrentino returned to Brooklyn College in 1955.

In 1956, Sorrentino, together with some friends from Brooklyn College, founded a literary magazine called Neon . The issues that Sorrentino edited, from 1956 to 1960, contained contributions from many prominent writers, including William Carlos Williams, LeRoi Jones, Hubert Selby, Jr, Fielding Dawson, and Joel Oppenheimer. From 1961 to 1963, Sorrentino both wrote for and edited Kulchur, a literary magazine whose contributors included members of the Black Mountain school, the Beats, and the New School. From 1965 to 1970, he worked at Grove Press, first as an assistant, then as an editor. His first editing assignment was Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X .

A prolific writer, Sorrentino has published over twenty volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays. His first book of poetry, The Darkness Surrounds Us, was published in 1960. Seven more volumes of his poetry were published between 1964 and 1981. Sorrentino’s first novel, The Sky Changes (1966), which he began writing in 1961, was followed by Steelwork (1970), in which Sorrentino draws upon memories of his Brooklyn childhood. Next came Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971), a roman á clef about the art and literary avant-garde community of 1950s and 1960s New York. After another novel, Spendide-Hôtel (1973), Sorrentino published his most commercially successful work, Mulligan Stew (1979). He has published eight more novels, most recently Red the Fiend (1995).

In addition to numerous grants, including two Guggenheim fellowships (1973, 1987), Sorrentino has won the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature (1981), an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1985), and the Lannan Literary award for fiction (1992). He currently teaches literature at Stanford University.

David Markson was born in Albany, New York, on December 20, 1927. He received his B.A. from Union College in 1950 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1952. During the 1940s and ’50s, he worked as a writer for the Albany Times-Union (1944–46, 1949–50), and as an editor for Dell publishers (1953–54) and Lion Books (1955–56). In addition, he has taught English at Long Island University (1964–66) and Columbia (1979–87). Markson has written seven novels, including The Ballad of Dingus Magee (1966), Springer’s Progress (1977), and Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1989). He has also published a collection of poetry (1993) and a critical study, Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth, Symbol, and Meaning . (1978).