James Campbell | |
---|---|
Born | 1951 (age 72–73) |
Alma mater | University of Edinburgh (1974–78) |
Occupation | Writer |
Notable work | Talking at the Gates (1991) Exiled in Paris (1995) Just Go Down to the Road (2022) |
James Campbell (born 1951) [1] [2] is a Scottish writer.
James Campbell was born in Croftfoot, on the southside of Glasgow. [3] He left school at the age of 15 to become an apprentice printer. [2] [4] After hitchhiking through Europe, Israel and North Africa, [5] he studied to gain acceptance to the University of Edinburgh (1974–78). [6]
On graduating, he immediately became editor of the New Edinburgh Review (1978–82). [6] His first book, Invisible Country: A Journey Through Scotland, was published in 1984. Two years later, Campbell published Gate Fever, "based on a year's acquaintance with the prisoners and staff of Lewes Prison's C Wing". [7]
Between 1991 and 1999, he wrote three books linked in theme: Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin, [8] Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and Others on the Left Bank (published in the US as Exiled in Paris ), and This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris. In 1993, Campbell's one-man play, The Midnight Hour, about a night in the life of James Baldwin, was staged at the Freedom Theatre, Philadelphia, with Reggie Montgomery in the role of Baldwin. [9] A revised edition of Talking at the Gates, with a new introduction and an interview with Norman Mailer about Baldwin, was published in 2021.
For many years, Campbell worked for The Times Literary Supplement (TLS). [1] Between 1998 and 2020, he wrote the weekly NB column on the back page of the TLS, under the pen-name "J.C.". A selection of the columns was published in 2023 under the title NB by J.C.: A Walk through the Times Literary Supplement. Reviewing the collection in The New York Times , Dwight Garner wrote: "one part of the TLS no one skips, in my experience, is the NB column . . . . He was interested in everything." [10] The Herald 's reviewer called Campbell "one of Scotland's finest under-recognised writers". [11]
As a writer for The Guardian in the first decade of the present century, he wrote some fifty profiles of literary figures, including Ian Hamilton Finlay, Shirley Hazzard, Arthur Miller, Gary Snyder and John Updike. [12] Campbell is also a writer for the New York Times Book Review . [13]
Campbell's Just Go Down to the Road: A Memoir of Trouble and Travel – described by Brian Morton in a TLS review as "more than a conventional memoir" [14] – was published in Britain and the US in May 2022.
William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "Shotgun Art".
Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi was a Scottish novelist.
Boris Vian was a French polymath who is primarily remembered for his novels. Those published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan were bizarre parodies of criminal fiction, highly controversial at the time of their release due to their unconventional outlook.
William Clark Styron Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.
James Arthur Baldwin was an American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked among the best English-language novels. His 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son helped establish his reputation as a voice for human equality. Baldwin was a well-known public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States.
The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) is a weekly literary review published in London by News UK, a subsidiary of News Corp.
Naked Lunch is a 1959 novel by American writer William S. Burroughs. The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes, intended by Burroughs to be read in any order. The novel follows the junkie William Lee, who takes on various aliases, from the U.S. to Mexico, eventually to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone.
Penelope Mary Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among "the ten best historical novels". A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."
The London Review of Books (LRB) is a British literary magazine published bimonthly that features articles and essays on fiction and non-fiction subjects, which are usually structured as book reviews.
Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008.
Interzone is a British fantasy and science fiction magazine. Published since 1982, Interzone is the eighth-longest-running English language science fiction magazine in history, and the longest-running British science fiction (SF) magazine. Stories published in Interzone have been finalists for the Hugo Awards and have won a Nebula Award and numerous British Science Fiction Awards.
Donna Louise Tartt is an American novelist and essayist. Her novels are The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013), which has been adapted into a 2019 film of the same name She was included in Time magazine's 2014 "100 Most Influential People" list.
James Grauerholz is a writer and editor. He is the bibliographer and literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs.
Shakespeare and Company is an English-language bookstore opened in 1951 by George Whitman, located on Paris's Left Bank.
Exiled in Paris is a 1995 book by James Campbell, a Scottish cultural historian specialising in American Literature and culture. He is the former editor of the New Edinburgh Review and works for the Times Literary Supplement. The book is a study of Left Bank cafe society in post-war Paris, particularly the influence of American expatriates, as indicated by its subtitle: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank.
The White Horse Tavern, located in New York City's borough of Manhattan at Hudson Street and 11th Street, is known for its 1950s and 1960s bohemian culture. It is one of the few major gathering-places for writers and artists from this period in Greenwich Village that remains open. The bar opened in 1880 but was more a longshoremen's bar than a literary center until Dylan Thomas and other writers began frequenting it in the early 1950s. Because of its literary fame, the White Horse has become popular with tourists.
Jonny Steinberg is a South African writer and scholar.
Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov that addresses the controversial subject of hebephilia. The protagonist is a French literature professor who moves to New England and writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert. He describes his obsession with a 12-year-old "nymphet", Dolores Haze, whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather. Privately, he calls her "Lolita", the Spanish nickname for Dolores. The novel was originally written in English, but fear of censorship in the U.S. and Britain led to it being first published in Paris, France, in 1955 by Olympia Press.
The Morning News is a U.S.-based daily online magazine founded in 1999 by Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack. It began as an email newsletter and in the fall of 2000 evolved into a news-oriented weblog with a New York focus. In October 2002, Baldwin and Womack launched The Morning News as a daily-published online magazine.
The Cambridge Literary Review (CLR) is a literary magazine published on an occasional basis. It is edited by Lydia Wilson, Rosie Šnajdr, Jocelyn Betts and Paige Smeaton and is run from Trinity Hall college at the University of Cambridge in England. It was founded in 2009 by Boris Jardine and Lydia Wilson with assistance from the University's 800th anniversary fund. It publishes poetry, short fiction and criticism, and although its commitment to experimental and often difficult works is influenced by the 'Cambridge School' of poetry it has included contributions by writers from around the world and in many languages. It has received notice in The Times Literary Supplement.