Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and John Updike will be the featured guests at the next Queens College Evening Readings, beginning at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 27, in the Music Building. This year's series marks….
By David J. Glenn
Three heavyweight authors are coming to Queens College to read from their works.
Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and John Updike will be the featured guests at the next Queens College Evening Readings, beginning at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 27, in the Music Building. This year's series marks the 25th anniversary of the Evening Readings.
All three authors have reached a level of stardom in the literary world.
Sontag, born in New York City in 1933, grew up in Tucson, Ariz. and Los Angeles, studied at Harvard and at the University of Paris. She was a philosophy lecturer at City College of New York and at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester, and from 1960 to 1964, was a religion instructor at Columbia University. She was a writer-in-residence at Rutgers, and contributed to the New York Review of books, Atlantic Monthly, Nation, Harper's, and other magazines.
She started her career as a novelist at age 30 with “The Benefactor,” partly a potpourri of works from 19th century Bildungsroman, a novel about forming character. In her story, a wealthy man struggles to make his daily life follow his strange dreams. The novel paved the way for Sontag's emphasis on art – her idea that one should not try to find 'the meaning” in a work of art, but should experience it as an entity in its own right. Her 1976 essay “On Photography” studied the force of photography as a kind of wedge between experience and reality.
Sontag wrote “Illness and Metaphor” (1978) after her treatment for cancer. Her second novel, “Death Kit” (1967), is a meditation on no less than life and death. As in “The Benefactor,” the protagonist has trouble distinguishing between dreams and waking life.
Her third novel, “The Volcano Lover” (1992), a bestseller, was set in 18th century England, depicting a 56-year-old ambassador, his 20-year-old wife, and Lord Nelson, who fell short of victory in war for the sake of a woman. The novel is a story of revolution and the status of women in the 1700s.
Sontag has hardly shied away from modern issues, either. In her 1999 essay, “Why are we in Kosovo?” she supported U.S. involvement: “The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this? … Would this have justified letting Hitler kill all the Jews on German territory?”
As a New York Times reviewer noted last October, Sontag has been anything but predictable in what she's going to come up with next. “If consistency is truly the hobgoblin of little minds,” Daphne Merkin wrote, “Sontag's mind must be very large, for she has never been stopped by her own last pronouncement.”
Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, N.J., but was raised in Brooklyn. When he was only 9 years old, he wrote a 250-page story in his notebooks, “Invasion From Mars.”
A 1939 graduate of Boys High School, he went on to earn a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from Harvard in 1943, but his life was to be devoted to the pen rather than the slide rule. While at Harvard, his piece, “The Greatest Thing in the World,” won a contest in Story magazine.
It took Mailer just 15 months to write his first novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” published when he was 25. The book, which drew international attention, drew largely on his World war II combat experiences in the Philippines as an Army sergeant.
His second novel, “Barbary Shore” (1951), depicting a former radical and a federal agent at a Brooklyn boarding house, was not received as well as his first work.
In the year that “Barnaby Shore” was published, Mailer moved to Greenwich Village, and started to become known as an anti-establishment writer. He co-founded and gave the name to the “Village Voice” alternative weekly.
His third novel, “The Deer Park” (1955) portrayed the corruption of values in Hollywood, and was heavily based on his relationship with artist Adele Morales, whom he married in 1954.
It was not a happy marriage. In 1960, Mailer stabbed Adele after an all-night Manhattan party. He was given a suspended sentence after she wouldn't press charges.
in his magazine essays and books, Mailer has written on everything from presidential conventions to the civil rights movement In “The Prisoner of Sex” (1971), Mailer proposed that one's gender might be the key determinant of perception of reality; feminists blasted the book, with Kate Millet depicting him as a poster-boy for male chauvinism in her “Sexual Politics.”
One of Mailer's best known works is “The Executioner's Song” (1979), a story based on the life and death of killer Gary Gilmore.
John Updike is internationally known for his “Rabbit” titles – “Rabbit Run” (1960), “Rabbit Redux (1971), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Rabbit is Rich” (1981) and Rabbit at Rest” (1990), all chronicling the fictitious star athlete, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom in the backdrop of the turbulent 1960s to his eventual decline. “'Rabbit Redux' is a raw book,” reviewer D.T. Max wrote in last December's issue of Book magazine. “You get the feeling that the Sixties nearly overwhelmed Updike. He was, as he remains, an incrementalist, an observer of the subtle changes in American consciousness.”
Updike has also written a large collection of short stories, poems, essays, and reviews of the work of many of his peers.
Updike was born in 1932 in small-town Shillington, Penn., which he used as a model for towns in his novels. He had to cope with stammering during his childhood, and was encouraged by his mother to write. He also read prolifically particularly books by Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and others.
Harvard was the college of his choice, mainly because it was the home of the “Harvard Lampoon,” which he came to edit.
In 1955 Updike joined the staff of The New Yorker. He left the magazine two years later to devote full time to writing novels.
But he never forsake his love of satire – he developed a reputation through his essays as a soft satirist, making fun of American daily life without being mean-spirited about it.
He didn't avoid poking fun at himself, either. “My purpose in reading,” he once said, “has ever secretly been not to come and judge, but to come and steal.”
For more information about the Evening Readings, call 997-4646.
Reach Qguide Editor David Glenn by e-mail at glenn@timesledger.com, or call 229-0300, Ext. 139.
