Edwin Mullhouse

Last updated
Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright
EdwinMullhouse.jpg
First edition
Author Steven Millhauser
Cover artistAlice & Martin Provensen
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf
Publication date
1972
Media typePrint
Pages305
ISBN 0-394-48009-0

Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright is the critically acclaimed [1] debut novel by American author Steven Millhauser, published in 1972 and written in the form of a biography of a fictitious person by a fictitious author. [2] It was Millhauser's best known novel until the publication of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler in 1997, [1] and according to Patrick McGrath writing in The New York Times it is his best work. [3] Edwin Mullhouse is described by Publishers Weekly as a 'cult novel'. [4]

Contents

Plot introduction

Jeffrey Cartwright plays Boswell to Edwin Mullhouse's Johnson, [1] and writes his biography. Edwin is an "eccentric young show-off who fancied himself something of a literary wonder"; [2] he writes a novel at age ten, but dies mysteriously at age eleven. [5]

The biography is divided into three parts: [6]

  1. The Early Years: Aug. 1, 1943 – Aug. 1, 1949: The "pre-literate years" in which Cartwright tells of Edwin's birth and childhood in Newfield, Connecticut including time spent in Kindergarten.
  2. The Middle Years: Aug. 2, 1949 – Aug. 1, 1952: The "literate years" when Edwin attends school; his tragic obsession with Rose Dorn featuring prominently.
  3. The Late Years: Aug. 2, 1952 – Aug. 1, 1954: The "literary years" cover the writing of Edwin's novel Cartoons and his untimely death.

Reception

William Hjortsberg from The New York Times praises that the novel "displays an enviable amount of craft, the harsh discipline that carves through the scar‐tissue of personality painfully developed during a process known as 'growing‐up.'...Edwin Mullhouse evokes the world of children with delicacy and precision...Steven Millhauser has written a rare and carefully evoked novel. He tells us quite a bit about the nature of children and supplies us with a few useful clues about art in the process" and concludes "If the story is sometimes slow, it is never uninteresting, and the high points soar with the breath‐held clarity of true fiction. You won't find the plot in this review; only your bookseller can supply that. The title about sums it up for the pill‐takers." [7]

Zachary Leader in the London Review of Books is also positive: "Stephen Millhauser, for all his novel's faults, is dazzlingly gifted, not just in the richly sensual precision and wit of his writing (the 'hot blue bulb' of the silver camera flash Edwin's father brings him, 'so that he can press his fingernails into the soft warm bumps of glass'), or his encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of American childhood ('paper bags and scraps of waxpaper tumbling across the deserted playground'), but in the gathering menace with which Jeffrey’s Humbert-like obsessiveness is revealed, and the (on the whole) becoming tentativeness with which its relation to the hoary chestnuts 'Art v. Life' and 'Intellect v. Instinct' is suggested." [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aldous Huxley</span> English writer and philosopher (1894–1963)

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including novels and non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">C. L. Moore</span> American science fiction and fantasy writer (1911–1987)

Catherine Lucille Moore was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, who first came to prominence in the 1930s writing as C. L. Moore. She was among the first women to write in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Moore's work paved the way for many other female speculative fiction writers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Eugenides</span> American novelist and short story writer

Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of the 1999 film of the same name, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shirley Jackson</span> American novelist, short-story writer (1916–1965)

Shirley Hardie Jackson was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Over the duration of her writing career, which spanned over two decades, she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Merle</span> French novelist

Robert Merle was a French novelist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William H. Gass</span> American fiction writer, critic, philosophy professor (1924–2017)

William Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles R. Johnson</span> American writer (BORN 1948)

Charles Richard Johnson is an American scholar and the author of novels, short stories, screen-and-teleplays, and essays, most often with a philosophical orientation. Johnson has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Dreamer and Middle Passage. Johnson was born in 1948 in Evanston, Illinois, and spent most of his career at the University of Washington in Seattle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Mackay Brown</span> Scottish poet 1921–1996

George Mackay Brown was a Scottish poet, author and dramatist with a distinctly Orcadian character. He is widely regarded as one of the great Scottish poets of the 20th century.

Michael Christopher Malone was an American author and television writer. He was noted for his work on the ABC Daytime drama One Life to Live, as well as for his novels Handling Sin (1983), Foolscap (1991), and the murder mystery First Lady (2002).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edwin Charles Tubb</span> British science fiction, fantasy, and western writer

Edwin Charles Tubb was a British writer of science fiction, fantasy and western novels. The author of over 140 novels and 230 short stories and novellas, Tubb is best known for The Dumarest Saga, an epic science-fiction saga set in the far future. Michael Moorcock wrote, "His reputation for fast-moving and colourful SF writing is unmatched by anyone in Britain."

<i>Across the River and into the Trees</i> 1950 novel by Ernest Hemingway

Across the River and Into the Trees is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1950, after first being serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine earlier that year. The title is derived from the last words of U.S. Civil War Confederate General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

<i>The Recognitions</i> Novel by William Gaddis

The Recognitions is the 1955 debut novel of US author William Gaddis. The novel was initially poorly received by critics. After Gaddis won a National Book Award in 1975 for his second novel, J R, his first work gradually received new and belated recognition as a masterpiece of American literature.

<i>Martin Dressler</i> 1996 novel by Steven Millhauser

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer is a 1996 novel by Steven Millhauser. It won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. It follows the exploits of Martin Dressler, a young, optimistic entrepreneur, in late nineteenth-century New York City. It vividly evokes its time and place through elaborate description.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul West (writer)</span>

Paul Noden West was a British-born American novelist, poet, and essayist. He was born in Eckington, Derbyshire in England to Alfred and Mildred (Noden) West. Before his death, he resided in Ithaca, New York, with his wife Diane Ackerman, a writer, poet, and naturalist. West is the author of more than 50 books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bud Shrake</span> American writer (1931–2009)

Edwin A. "Bud" Shrake, Jr. was an American journalist, sportswriter, novelist, biographer and screenwriter. He co-wrote a series of golfing advice books with golf coach Harvey Penick, including Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, a golf guide that became the best-selling sports book in publishing history. Called a “lion of Texas letters” by the Austin American-Statesman, Shrake was a member of the Texas Film Hall of Fame, and received the Lon Tinkle lifetime achievement award from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Texas Book Festival Bookend Award.

Steven Millhauser is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Martin Dressler.

Harold Edwin Standish was a Canadian poet and novelist, best known for his 1949 novel The Golden Time and his long poem The Lake of Souls (1957). A significant Canadian modernist along with the likes of Earle Birney, Douglas LePan, and Sheila Watson, Standish was known for his experiments with literary form and skeptical views of Canadian nationalism at a time, during the 1950s and 60s, when many Canadians sought to establish a distinctive literary tradition for Canada. Largely forgotten in recent years, his work remains significant for its vivid evocations of working class life in rural Southern Ontario.

Jeffrey Lewis, also known as Jeff Lewis, is an American novelist and screenwriter. He has published eight novels, most notably the four novels of The Meritocracy Quartet. In television, as a writer-producer of Hill Street Blues, he earned 12 Emmy Award nominations, eight for writing and four as a producer, winning Emmys twice. Additionally, he received eight Writers Guild of America Award nominations and won once in 1984. He was a showrunner of Hill Street Blues during its sixth season and co-showrunner with his Yale University roommate David Milch, whom he recruited to join Hill Street Blues, during its seventh season.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literature of New England</span>

The literature of New England has had an enduring influence on American literature in general, with themes such as religion, race, the individual versus society, social repression, and nature, emblematic of the larger concerns of American letters.

Anne Goodwin Winslow was an American novelist and short-story writer who published her first work of prose at the age of 68.

References