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Authors at BU through the decades
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March 10, 1961: South African novelist and nonfiction and short story writer Nadine Gordimer with William O. Brown of the African Studies Program, at the University's Faculty Club. Gordimer, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, was born in 1923 into a well-to-do South African family in a mining town near Johannesburg that was the setting for her first novel, The Lying Days. Since her first collection of short stories was published in 1949, Gordimer has written about the psychological consequences of a racially divided society. “When I began to write as a very young person in a rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society, I felt, as many others did, that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas, of imagination and beauty,” she said at the Nobel banquet. “These, taking shape in poetry and fiction, drama, painting, and sculpture, were exclusive to that distant realm known as ‘overseas.' It was the dream of my contemporaries, black and white, to venture there as the only way to enter the world of artists.”
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December 1978: Playwright Edward Albee at the College of Fine Arts. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1928, Albee was adopted as an infant by Reed Albee, son of a powerful American vaudeville producer. Although raised in an atmosphere of great affluence, Albee associated with artists and intellectuals whom his strong-minded mother found objectionable. At the age of 20, he moved to Greenwich Village and held odd jobs until 1959, when his play of a drifter who acts out his own murder, The Zoo Story, made him famous. He was soon hailed as the leader of a new theatrical movement — American absurdist drama — with his successive plays The Sandbox and The American Dream. Albee has described his work as “an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation, and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.” He won his third Pultizer Prize for 1994's Three Tall Women, as well as best play awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle, an Obie, and a Tony.
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November 21, 1978. Poet Allen Ginsberg (left) and novelist, short story writer, and poet John Updike at a poetry reading on campus. Ginsberg was born in Newark, N.J., in 1926. While attending Columbia University, he forged strong friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, all later prominent in the Beat Movement. His first book of poems, Howl, was translated into more than 22 languages. In the 1960s and '70s, he studied Zen and then cofounded and directed the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Colorado. He died in 1997. In his poem “Death and Fame,” Ginsberg wrote:
When I die
I don't care what happens to
throw ashes in the air, scatter 'em
bury an urn in Elizabeth,
But I want a big funeral . . .
John Updike is best known for his novels Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, the last two Pulitzer prize winners. He was born in Reading, Pa., in 1932. His mother encouraged the stammering, psoriasis-racked child to write. He attended Harvard, edited the Harvard Lampoon, then was on The New Yorker staff until he left to write full-time. His several awards include the National Book Award in Fiction, the O. Henry Prize, the American Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. In 2003, he received the National Medal for the Humanities. In a 1996 Salon interview, he addressed the influence of movies on his novel In the Beauty of Lilies. “It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive. There were all kinds of things you learned. Like the 19th-century novels, you saw how other social classes lived — especially the upper classes. . . . Once television began to steal away that . . . audience, the movies seemed to get frantic: ‘What can we do that the TV can't?' And so you've got spectacle on the one hand, and a constant pushing of the sexual envelope on the other.”
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May 17, 1973: Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz at Marsh Plaza. Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. His grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and novelist whose extensive library introduced great literature to Paz, who began to write when he was quite young. In 1937, he traveled to Spain to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. He returned to Mexico and helped found the journal Taller (Workshop), a magazine that signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico. In 1962, he was appointed Mexican ambassador to India and wrote a number of books there until he resigned in protest against the government's bloody suppression of student demonstrations during the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games. In 1990, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the Nobel banquet, he spoke of mankind's cult of progress and its endangerment of nature, and said that we “can only defend life if we experience a revival of this feeling of solidarity with nature.”
Photos by BU Photo Services
16
January 2004
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