Wakeful Anguish: A Literary Biography of William Humphrey (Southern Literary Studies)

book: Wakeful Anguish: A Literary Biography of William Humphrey (Southern Literary Studies) | Ashby Bland Crowder

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Wakeful Anguish: A...

	Wakeful Anguish: A Literary Biography of William Humphrey (Southern Literary Studies) Ashby Bland Crowder Louisiana State University Press, 2004 - 456 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Ashby Bland Crowder has a Hit on his Hands!

Ashby Bland Crowder has done a fantastic job recreating the life and times of an elusive novelist, who was at once proud and ashamed of being a Texan. Since his death, William Humphrey's reputation has gone into a tailspin. Crowder gives all the work a sympathetic reading, and makes a case for Humphrey as a novelist of great power and skill, on a par with William Faulkner. The individual readings are extremely lengthy, however, and many readers will skip twenty or thirty pages to get right back to Humphrey's fascinatingly exasperated life. An indifferent teacher (at Bard College) and an Anglophile on the order of Madonna, Humphrey was something of a heterosexual drama queen, often taking offense at minor slights or the converse, trampling over others' individual rights. Perhaps as a consequence, his last days were a nightmare of Kafka proportions, and Crowder doesn't flinch from painting a bleak picture. As a study in contradictions, "Wakeful Anguish" gets it right.

One caveat, I cannot understand those, like Crowder, who downplay the film Vincente Minnelli made of Humphrey's 1950s novel "Home from the Hill." Crowder pegs it as trash, but he should be more sympathetic; indeed, Minnelli's Home from the Hill is wonderful in ways Humphrey's novel never aspires to. Both are worthwhile, and the film is a masterwork.

But don't let that stop you from acquiring a copy of this book, one of the most enthralling literary biographies of the year.

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