Wallace Markfield (August 12, 1926 – May 24, 2002) was an American comic novelist best known for his first novel, To an Early Grave (1964), about four men who spend the day driving across Brooklyn to their friend's funeral. He is also known for Teitlebaum's Window (1970), a comic novel about a Jewish boy growing up in Brooklyn in the 1930s and 1940s. Markfield was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965 after the publication of To an Early Grave.
Markfield was born in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School, earning a B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1947, then doing his graduate work at New York University between 1948–1950. While giving a lecture on "Stéphane Mallarmé and Alienation" at the City College of New York, Markfield was interrupted by potato salad splattering suddenly onto his face. The disruptive potato salad, thrown by Carl Solomon and two of Solomon's friends, including future National LGBTQ Task Force co-founder Ron Gold, was an effective demonstration of the principles of Dadaism, one of the subjects Markfield was discussing in his lecture. Many in the audience did not appreciate the irony. [1] The potato salad incident would later be immortalized in Allen Ginsberg's famous poem, Howl. In 1948 Markfield married Anna May Goodman; the couple had a daughter named Andrea. He later taught creative writing at San Francisco State College (1966–68), Kirkland College (1968–69), and Queens College (1971–73). At the time of his death he had been working on a novel for eleven years. Markfield died of a heart attack in Roslyn, New York, on May 24, 2002. Anna tried to get his last novel published, but his agent Candida Donadio had died Jan 20, 2001, and her successor showed no interest. Eventually Andrea published it electronically.
In addition to To an Early Grave and Teitelbaum's Window Markfield also wrote You Could Live If They Let You (1974), Multiple Orgasms (1977) and Radical Surgery (1991). The 1991 thriller was already conceived by the end of the 1970s. Throughout his writing career, Markfield also contributed at least 40 articles to periodicals. Dalkey Archive Press reissued Teitelbaum's Window in October 1999 and To an Early Grave in December 2000.
In an interview conducted in the spring of 1978 at Markfield's home in Port Washington, New York he said: "[Multiple Orgasms] was a first person narrative, completely through the eyes of a woman. I found it awfully tiresome after a while, though I never find women tiresome. But she became just a great bore to me. After about a hundred and seventy-five pages or so, I just gave up. It was getting nowhere." [2] It was published only as a limited edition of about three hundred copies, individually numbered and signed by the author.
In 1968 To an Early Grave was adapted for the screen under the title Bye Bye Braverman , directed by Sidney Lumet and starring George Segal and Jack Warden.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Captain Robert von Ranke Graves was an English poet, soldier, historical novelist and critic. His father was Alfred Perceval Graves, a celebrated Irish poet and figure in the Gaelic revival; they were both Celticists and students of Irish mythology.
Frank Morrison Spillane, better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, whose stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. Spillane was also an occasional actor, once even playing Hammer himself in the 1965 film The Girl Hunters.
All-American Comics is a comics anthology and the flagship title of comic book publisher All-American Publications, one of the forerunners of DC Comics. It ran for 102 issues from 1939 to 1948. Characters created for the title, including Green Lantern, the Atom, the Red Tornado, Doctor Mid-Nite, and Sargon the Sorcerer, later became mainstays of the DC Comics line.
Andrew Charles Cyrille is an American avant-garde jazz drummer. Throughout his career, he has performed both as a leader and a sideman in the bands of Walt Dickerson and Cecil Taylor, among others. AllMusic biographer Chris Kelsey wrote: "Few free-jazz drummers play with a tenth of Cyrille's grace and authority. His energy is unflagging, his power absolute, tempered only by an ever-present sense of propriety."
Alan King was an American comedian, actor and satirist known for his biting wit and often angry humorous rants. He was also a serious actor who appeared in a number of films and television shows. King wrote several books, produced films, and appeared in plays. In his later years, he helped many philanthropic causes.
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.
Carl Solomon was an American writer. One of his best-known pieces of writing is Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient.
Ben Hur is a 1907 American silent drama film set in ancient Rome, the first screen adaptation of Lew Wallace's popular 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Co-directed by Sidney Olcott and Frank Oakes Rose, this "photoplay" was produced by the Kalem Company of New York City, and its scenes, including the climactic chariot race, were filmed in the city's borough of Brooklyn.
Harry Mathews was an American writer, the author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. Mathews was also a translator of the French language.
Dubrow’s was a family owned chain of cafeteria-style restaurants in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Miami Beach. Dubrow’s was established on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1929 by Benjamin Dubrow, an immigrant from Minsk, Belarus. Benjamin was married to Rose Solowey from the country now known as Belarus. They had five children: George, Minnie, Lila, Sylvia and Ruth.
Salade niçoise is a salad that originated in the French city of Nice. It is traditionally made of tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, Niçoise olives and anchovies or tuna, dressed with olive oil, or in some historical versions, a vinaigrette. It has been popular worldwide since the early 20th century, and has been prepared and discussed by many chefs. Delia Smith called it "one of the best combinations of salad ingredients ever invented" and Gordon Ramsay said that "it must be the finest summer salad of all".
Abraham Lincoln High School is a public high school located at 2800 Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, New York under the jurisdiction of the New York City Department of Education. The school was built in 1929, and since graduated four Nobel Prize laureates. The current principal is Ari A. Hoogenboom.
Norman Siegel is the former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), New York's leading civil rights organization, under the umbrella of the nationwide American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), as well as a former candidate for Public Advocate in New York City and a noted civil rights attorney.
Bye Bye Braverman is a 1968 American comedy film directed by Sidney Lumet. The screenplay by Herbert Sargent was adapted from the 1964 novel To an Early Grave by Wallace Markfield.
Anne Koedt is an American radical feminist activist and author of "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm", a 1970 classic feminist work on women's sexuality. She was connected to the group New York Radical Women and was a founding member of New York Radical Feminists.
Woodrow Gelman was a publisher, cartoonist, novelist and an artist-writer for both animation and comic books. As the publisher of Nostalgia Press, he pioneered the reprinting of vintage comic strips in quality hardcovers and trade paperbacks. As an editor and art director for two-and-a-half decades at Topps Chewing Gum, he introduced many innovations in trading cards and humor products.
Jim Krusoe is an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His stories and poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, BOMB, Iowa Review, Field, North American Review, American Poetry Review, and Santa Monica Review, which he founded in 1988. His essays and book reviews have appeared in Manoa, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New York Times and The Washington Post. He is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund. He teaches at Santa Monica College and in the graduate writing program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. His novel Iceland was selected by the Los Angeles Times and the Austin Chronicle as one of the ten best fiction books of 2002, and it was on the Washington Post list of notable fiction for the same year. His novel Girl Factory was published in 2008 by Tin House Books followed by Erased, which was published in 2009 and Toward You published in 2010, also by Tin House Books.
Isaac Rosenfeld was an American writer who became a prominent member of New York intellectual circles. Rosenfeld wrote one novel, which, according to literary critic Marck Shechner, "helped fashion a uniquely American voice by marrying the incisiveness of Mark Twain to the Russian melancholy of Dostoevsky," and many articles for The Nation, Partisan Review, and The New Republic. Some of those articles were posthumously published in a volume titled An Age of Enormity, and his short stories were later published as Alpha and Omega.
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories. In addition to writing, Wallace was employed as a professor at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, and Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Blondshell is the debut album by American singer-songwriter Blondshell, released on April 7, 2023 via Partisan Records. Having previously garnered attention as a pop artist under the name BAUM, the album sees Blondshell embrace a darker alternative rock sound inspired by artists of the 1990s. Upon release, Blondshell received critical acclaim, and was included in several publications' lists of the best albums of 2023.