Dossier curs 2013 2014

Tertúlia literària en anglès Dossier del curs 2013 - 2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc Montgat

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

CALENDARI DE LECTURES 2013 - 2014 DATA

AUTOR

TÍTOL Presentació

13 setembre 4 octubre

Capote, Truman

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

8 novembre

James, P.D.

Cover her face

13 desembre

Kerouac, Jack

On the road

Articles

10 gener 7 febrer

Tyler, Anne

Digging to America

7 març

MacCullers, Carson

The Ballad of the sad café

11 abril

Updike, John

Terrorist

9 maig

Woolf, Virginia

Mrs. Dalloway

13 juny

Sharpe, Tom

The Wilt inheritance

-2-

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

CAPOTE, Truman

Breakfast at Tiffany’s BIOGRAPHY

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on September 30, 1924, Truman Capote went on to become a professional writer, making waves with his debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms. His novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) was adapted into a popular film, and his book In Cold Blood (1966) was a pioneering form of narrative nonfiction. Capote spent his later years pursuing celebrity and struggled with drug addiction. He died in 1984 in Los Angeles, California.

In Breakfast at Tiffany's. He explored the life of a New York City party girl, Holly Golightly—who was a woman who depended on men to get by. With his usual style and panache, Capote had created a fascinating character within a well-crafted story. Three years later, the film version was released, starring Audrey Hepburn as Holly. Capote had wanted Marilyn Monroe in the lead role, and was disappointed with this adaptation.

Throughout his career, Truman Capote remained one of America’s most controversial and colorful authors, combining literary genius with a penchant for the glittering world of high society.

Though he wrote only a handful of books, his prose styling was impeccable, and his insight into the psychology of human desire was extraordinary. His flamboyant and well-documented lifestyle has often overshadowed his gifts as a writer, but over time Capote’s work will outlive the celebrity.

Born in New Orleans in 1924, Capote was abandoned by his mother and raised by his elderly aunts and cousins in Monroeville, Alabama. As a child he lived a solitary and lonely existence, turning to writing for solace. Of his early days Capote related, “I began writing really sort of seriously when I was about eleven. I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever, I used to go home from school every day and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it.”

In his mid-teens, Capote was sent to New York to live with his mother and her new husband.

Disoriented by life in the city, he dropped out of school, and at age seventeen, got a job with The New Yorker magazine. Within a few years he was writing regularly for an assortment of publications. One of his stories, “Miriam,” attracted the attention of publisher Bennett Cerf, who signed the young writer to a contract with Random House. Capote’s first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was published in 1948. Other Voices, Other Rooms received instant notoriety for its fine prose, its frank discussion of homosexual themes, and, perhaps most of all, for its erotically suggestive cover photograph of Capote himself.

With literary success came social celebrity. The young writer was lionized by the high society elite, and was seen at the best parties, clubs, and restaurants. He answered accusations of frivolousness by claiming he was researching a future book. His short novel, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), took much of its inspiration from these experiences. With the publication of Breakfast at -3-

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Tiffany’s and the subsequent hit film staring Audrey Hepburn, Capote’s popularity and place among the upper crust was assured. His ambition, however, was to be great as well as popular, and so he began work on a new experimental project that he imagined would revolutionize the field of journalism.

In 1959, Capote set about creating a new literary genre — the non-fiction novel. In Cold Blood (1966), the book that most consider his masterpiece, is the story of the 1959 murder of the four members of a Kansas farming family, the Clutters. Capote left his jet-set friends and went to Kansas to delve into the small-town life and record the process by which they coped with this loss.

During his stay, the two murderers were caught, and Capote began an involved interview with both.

For six years, he became enmeshed in the lives of both the killers and the townspeople, taking thousands of pages of notes. Of In Cold Blood, Capote said, “This book was an important event for me. While writing it, I realized I just might have found a solution to what had always been my greatest creative quandary. I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry.” In Cold Blood sold out instantly, and became one of the most talked about books of its time. An instant classic, In Cold Blood brought its author millions of dollars and a fame unparalleled by nearly any other literary author since.

To celebrate the book’s success, Capote threw what many called the “Party of the Century,” the famous “Black and White Ball.” This masked ball, at New York’s elegant Plaza Hotel, was to be the pinnacle of both his literary endeavors and his popularity. Overwhelmed by the lifestyles of the rich and famous, Capote began to work on a project exploring the intimate details of his friends. He received a large advance for a book which was to be called Answered Prayers (after Saint Theresa of Avila’s saying that answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered). The book was to be a biting and largely factual account of the glittering world in which he moved. The publication of the first few chapters in Esquire magazine in 1975 caused a major scandal.

With these first short publications Capote found that many of his close friends and acquaintances shut him off completely. Though he claimed to be working on Answered Prayers (which many imagined would be his greatest work), the shock of the initial negative reactions sent him into a spiral of drug and alcohol use, during which time he wrote very little of any quality.

When Capote died in 1984, at the age of fifty-nine, he left behind no evidence of any continued progress on Answered Prayers. Though many feel that Capote did not live up to the promise of his early work, it is clear from what he did write that he was an artist of exquisite talent and vision. With both his fiction and his non-fiction, he created a body of work that will continue to move readers and inspire writers for years.

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S In autumn 1943, the unnamed narrator becomes friends with Holly Golightly, who calls him "Fred", after her older brother. The two are both tenants in a brownstone apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Holly (age 18-19) is a country girl turned New York café society girl.

As such, she has no job and lives by socializing with wealthy men, who take her to clubs and restaurants, and give her money and expensive presents; she hopes to marry one of them.

Holly likes to shock people with carefully selected tidbits from her personal life or her outspoken viewpoints on various topics. Over the next year, she slowly reveals herself to the narrator, who finds himself fascinated by her curious lifestyle. In the end, Holly fears that she will

-4-

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

never know what is really hers until after she has thrown it away. Their relationship rnds in autumm 1944.

-5-

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

JAMES, P.D.

Cover her face BIOGRAPHY

Born in The United Kingdom, August 03, 1920. P. D. James is the author of twenty books, most of which have been filmed and broadcast on television in the United States and other countries. She spent thirty years in various departments of the British Civil Service, including the Police and Criminal Law Department of Great Britain's Home Office. She has served as a magistrate and as a governor of the BBC. In 2000 she celebrated her eightieth birthday and published her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest. The recipient of many prizes and honors, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991. She lives in London and Oxford.

Awards: International Crime Writing Hall of Fame 2008; Grand Master Award from Mystery Writers of America, 1999; Diamond Dagger from British Crime Writers' Association, 1987.

Frequently Asked Questions for P.D. James I receive a very large number of letters enquiring about my work and I hope the following will answer most questions. I apologise to correspondents for not sending a personal reply to their enquiries, but it is proving impossible to continue to do this and have time for my writing.

--P.D. James 1. How did you begin writing?

I knew from very early childhood that I wanted to be a novelist but for a number of reasons I did not begin writing my first novel, Cover Her Face, until I was in my late thirties. It was accepted by the first publisher to whom it was sent and was published in 1962.

2. Why did you choose crime?

I began with a detective story because: •

I very much enjoyed reading them in my adolescence

• I thought that I might be able to write one successfully in which case, as a popular genre, it would stand a good chance of acceptance by a publisher •

I am fascinated by construction in a novel and the detective story has to be well-constructed • I did not wish to use the more traumatic events of my own life in an autobiographical first novel and saw the writing of a detective story as a valuable apprenticeship.

-6-

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

After I had progressed in my craft I came to believe that it is possible to write within the conventions of a classical detective story and still be regarded as a serious novelist and say something true about men and women and the society in which they live.

3. What is the difference between the detective story and the crime novel?

I see the detective story as a subspecies of the crime novel. The crime novel can include a remarkable variety of works from the cosy certainties of Agatha Christie, through Anthony Trollope and Graham Greene, to the great Russians. The detective story may be considered more limited in scope and potential. The reader can expect to find a central mysterious death, a closed circle of suspects each with credible motive, means and opportunity for the crime, a detective, either amateur or professional, who comes in like an avenging deity to solve it, and a solution at the end of the book which the reader should be able to arrive at by logical deduction from clues presented by the writer with deceptive cunning but essential fairness. What interests me is the extraordinary variety of talents which this so-called formula is able to accommodate.

4. How do you get your first idea?

Usually my creative imagination is sparked off by the setting rather than by the method of murder or by any of the characters. I have a strong reaction to place and may visit a lonely stretch of coast, a sinister old house or a community of people and feel strongly that I wish to set a novel there.

For example, The Black Tower began with a visit to the Purbeck coast of Dorset and A Taste for Death originated in a visit to an Oxford church near the canal. After the setting come the characters, and then the actual murder and the clues.

5. What other writers have influenced you?

I can detect in my work the influence of four very different writers: Jane Austen, Dorothy L. Sayers, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.

6. Why do women make such good crime novelists?

I am not sure whether women would still be pre-eminent if we examined the whole spectrum of crime writing, but they certainly do excel in the traditional classical detective story. This may be because women have an eye for detail and clue-making demands attention to the minutiae of everyday living. Women, too, are interested in emotions and motives rather than in fast action and weaponry. It may be that women find the formal construction of the detective story psychologically supportive, so that we are able to deal within this structure with violent events which we might not so confidently tackle in the so-called straight novel.

7. What is your method of working?

First comes the idea which, as I have said, usually arises from the setting. There is then a period of plotting and planning which may take many months, sometimes as long as the actual writing. During this period I am never without a notebook. When the book is plotted I begin writing, but seldom at the beginning of the novel. It is rather as if I am making a film. I write the sequences out of order and then put the book together at the end. I write by hand and then dictate to my secretary who types it into the computer.

8. How did you create your hero/detective Adam Dalgliesh?

Adam Dalgliesh is not drawn from any person I know but does, I suppose, represent the qualities I most admire in a man, i.e. sensitivity, courage and intelligence. I began with a

-7-

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

professional detective attached to New Scotland Yard because I was setting out to write what I hoped would be a fairly realistic detective story and thought that this required a professional detective. Later I created Cordelia Gray, my private eye.

9. How has the detective story changed since the last war?

The detective story is far closer to the straight novel than were the rather cosy mysteries of the 1930s when setting, characterisation and, sometimes, psychological truth were all sacrificed to ingenuity of plot. The modern mystery (as the Americans call it) is often more violent, more sexually explicit, less confident in its affirmation of law and order and far more concerned with character and motive than with the ingenuity of the murder itself.

10. Why are detective stories so popular?

The critics have forecast the death of the classical detective story at every decade, but the form remains remarkably resilient. There are the attractions of a strong plot, a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. There is the challenge of a puzzle for those who like following clues. The detective story, like other forms of crime novel, provides vicarious excitement and danger. But there are other interesting psychological reasons. The classical detective story is rather like the modern morality play. It can provide catharsis, a means by which both writer and reader exorcise irrational feelings of anxiety or guilt. The basic moral premise, the sanctity of life, is also an attraction as is the solution of the plot at the end of the book. The classical detective story affirms our belief that we live in a rational and generally benevolent universe.

COVER HER FACE “Cover Her Face� is the debut 1962 crime novel of P. D. James. It details the investigations by her poetry-writing detective Adam Dalgliesh into the death of a young, ambitious maid, surrounded by a family which has reasons to want her gone - or dead. The title is taken from a passage from John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi: "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle; she died young."

-8-

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

KEROUAC, Jack

On the road BIOGRAPHY Born In Lowell, Massachusetts, The United States. March 12, 1922. Died October 21, 1969. Influences:Neal Cassady, Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, Fyodor Dostoyevsky,

Jack Kerouac was an American novelist, writer, poet, and artist. He is perhaps the best known of a group of writers and friends who came to be known as the Beat Generation, a term he himself created Kerouac's work was popular, but received little critical acclaim during his lifetime. Today, he is considered an important and influential writer who inspired others, including Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan, and Ken Kesey, and writers of the New Journalism.

Kerouac also influenced musicians such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Morrissey, Tom Waits, Simon & Garfunkel, Lebris, Ulf Lundell and Jim Morrison. Kerouac's best-known books are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody. “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” Jack Kerouac, On the Road Jack Kerouac's Octoberish magic There's something very autumnal about the master Beat's writing, and October was a key month throughout his career When the leaves turn to gold and brown and the pale mist makes islands of the hilltops, and the dark nights start to creep in ever earlier, I always think of Jack Kerouac.

Kerouac is, for me, a highly autumnal writer, and I feel the weight of his words most keenly in October. It was a month beloved of Kerouac himself, who wrote at the close of the first act of On the Road, "I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October."

Home, for Jean-Louis Kerouac, was Lowell, a small mill-town in Massachusetts where he was born and where his gravestone has sat, with the message "He honored life", since his death in …

October, of course, 21 October 1969.

This October seems particularly Kerouackian. Last week saw the release of the long-awaited movie version of his Beat classic On the Road, the unfilmable book filmed by Walter Salles. On The Road was famously written in a speed-fuelled haze on a long roll of paper so Kerouac wouldn't have

-9-

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

to interrupt his crazy, spontaneous, be-bop prose-poetry by having to put a new sheet into his typewriter: the original scroll is on display at the British Library until the end of the year.

Jack's hometown celebrates the writer every October, with this year's festivities including a literary festival, the world premiere performance of a Kerouac play, The Beat Generation, and even a 5k road race in his honour.

And it's Lowell which surely must have made Kerouac so Octoberish. At the heart of New England, famous for its displays of autumn leaves, it certainly inspired one of his most intriguing works, Doctor Sax, a collision of childhood memories entwined with the imaginary adventures of the titular pulp anti-hero spook of Jack's childhood imaginings.

"In the Fall there were great sere brown sidefields sloping down to the Merrimac all rich with broken pines and browns," he writes in Doctor Sax, which is redolent with childhood adventures through the autumn dusk, loitering on the "wrinkly tar corner" of his beloved Moody Street.

In Book of Dreams, the 1960 collection of his mind's nocturnal wanderings, the only dated entry – October 14 1953 – harks back to the Lowell of Doctor Sax, "where figures stalk cleanly and sharp in soft gloom clouds…"

For all his travelling, Kerouac never let Lowell leave his heart. As a young man in New York in 1941 he swapped letters with his childhood friend (and later brother-in-law) Sebastian Sampas, many of which are printed as back-matter in the "lost" Kerouac novel The Sea Is My Brother, published by Penguin earlier this year. The letters include excerpts from a play the young Jack began to write called Oktober, featuring a personification of the autumn season and a recurring line "the end of something old, old, old" which reappeared in his poem "I Tell You It Is October", in the collection Atop an Underwood. Editor Dawn M Ward observed: "To both young men the month of October was in many ways magical, transcendent to the everyday."

Kerouac never really returned to Lowell, until his funeral on October 24 1969. There's a tale – apocryphal, I think – that two old Lowellians watched the procession up to Edson cemetery and one asked the other who had died. "Jack Kerouac," said one. The other shrugged. "Who's Jack Kerouac?"

Kerouac, of course, was past caring. He was dead and buried, and it was, (to quote the title of one of his beautiful prose-poems) October in the Railroad Earth, when "high in the sky the magic stars ride above the following hotshot freight trains".

ON THE ROAD On the Road is based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across America. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetryand drug use.

The idea for On the Road formed during the late 1940s. It was to be Kerouac's second novel, and it underwent several drafts before he completed it in April 1951. It was first published by Viking Press in 1957.

When the book was originally released, The New York Times hailed it as "the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is." In 1998, the Modern Library ranked On the Road 55th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th

- 10 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

century. The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

- 11 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

TYLER, Anne

Digging to America BIOGRAPHY Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the daughter of Lloyd Parry Tyler, an industrial chemist, and Phyllis Mahon Tyler, a social worker. Before settling in Raleigh, North Carolina, the family lived among various Quaker communities in the rural south. These years formed background for Tyler's Southern literary flavor, which is seen in the settings of her fiction.

Also the writer Eudora Welty, who has depicted the Mississippi of her childhood, has influenced Tyler.

The Tylers moved several times in their search for an ideal place to raise their children. In 1948, when Anne was six, the Tyler family found the Celo Community, near Burnsville, in the mountains of North Carolina. The community operated on a shared labor basis. At Celo the Tylers lived in their own house, raised some stock, and used organic farming techniques. The children in the settlemed received lessons in art, carpentry, and cooking. Anne attended also a small local public school at Harvard. According to a story, whenever the school's principal had to take a short leave to look after his cows, Anne was put in charge.

By the age of seven Anne had started to write stories. Most of these early writings concerned "lucky, lucky girls who got to go west in covered wagons." Her favorite book was The Little House

by Virginia Lee Burton. Later she has said that the book showed her "how the world worked, how the years flowed by and people altered and nothing could ever stay the same." At the age of 19 Tyler graduated from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, where she twice won the Anne Flexner Award for creative writing. Her first published short story, 'Laura,' appeared in Duke University's literary magazine, the Archive. She became a member of Phi Beta Kappa and did post-graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. Before settling in Baltimore, her home town for much of her adult life, Tyler was a bibliographer at Duke University, ordering books from the Soviet Union, and worked in the law library of McGill University. Tyler married in 1963 the Iranian-born child psychiatrist Taghi Modarressi; they had two daughters. Her husband died in 1997.

As a writer Tyler made her debut with If Morning Ever Comes (1964). It depicted a young man, Ben Joe Hawkes, who returns from Columbia to North Carolina and attempts to find his own way under family expectations. He knows that his father had lived alternately with his wife and mistress and his grandmother married his grandfather although she was in love with another man.

Finally Ben must decide how to continue with his ex-girlfriend.

In 1967 Tyler became a full-time writer. She won in 1977 an award from the American Academy for Earthly Possessions. Her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) explores tensions inside a family – for Tyler it is the basic battlefield of all society. The events are seen from the perspective from each member in turn. Pearl Cody Tull's children have all their own view of her

- 12 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

– she is violently abusive, suspicious, or nurturing. Absentminded Ezra, the youngest son, runs the restaurant of the title, where Pearl's husband and her children gather for dinner after her funeral.

The Accidental Tourist won in 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award and was made into a film in 1988, directed by Lawrence Kasdan and starring William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. The protagonist is Macon Leary, who writers travel guides for travel-hating businessmen. After his son, Ethan is murdered in a fast-food joint and his wife Sarah leaves him, Macon spends his time in planes, addicted to routine. "He approved planes. When the weather was calm, you couldn't even tell you were moving. You could pretend you were sitting safe at home. The view from the window was always the same – air and more air – and the interior of one plane was practically interchangeable with the interior of any other." Macon's routines are shattered when he meets Muriel Pritchett, a dog trainer and her young son. Macon moves in with Muriel, but Sarah wants him back. As is many Tyler's novels, the characters are hesitant to flee their present lives. In this story Tyler also reassures that what ever happens, life goes on. The Amateur Marriage (2003), Tyler's sixteenth novel, shows on the other hand, that domestic conflicts have the tendency to continue several generations.

Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay marry during the early World War II years. The dissolving of their marriage takes decades.

In 1989 Tyler won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons, a story of a couple who have been married for 28 years. Maggie Moran is the eternal optimist, daring and enterprising. She is married to Ira, who plays solitaire, and the mother of Jesse, a dropout from high school, and Daisy.

On a hot summer day Maggie and Ira drive to the funeral of the husband of Maggie's best friend.

During their 90-mile trip, Tyler explores the problems of marriage, love and happiness. "She [Tyler] loves love stories, though she often inventories the woe and entropy of lovelessness. She likes a wedding and all the ways weddings can differ, loves to enumerate the idiosyncrasies of children's sensibilities and of house furnishings. Temperate though she is, she celebrates intemperance, zest and an appetite for whatever, just as long as families stay together. She wants her characters plausibly married and carring for each other." (Edward Hoagland in The New York Times, September 11, 1988) In Saint Maybe (1991) Tyler dealt with the theme of guilt inside an unhappy middle-class family. After the death of his older brother Danny and his grief-stricken widow, Ian is tortured by self-accusations. He takes care for the orphaned children with his parents and becomes in the eyes of the youngest "King Careful. Mr. Look-Both-Ways. Saint Maybe." Ladder of the Year (1996) is a story about a woman who leaves her marriage and family to discover who she is. A Patchwork Planet (1998) is about Barnaby Gaitlin, a former delinquent, incurable optimist, and divorced. His daughter Opal, with her suspicious, piercing questions, sounds like her mother. Barnaby helps old people through an organization called Rent-a-Back, but it is a mystery for him what makes some people more virtuous than others. "One of the high points of this narrative is a potluck Thanksgiving dinner at which no one has provided a turkey. There are two pumpkin chiffon pies, a marshmallowyam casserole, and a cake made in Sophia’s Crock-Pot, and the difficulty is this: 'If a meal is mainly dessert, it’s hard to know when it’s over.'"(Hilary Mantel in The New York Review of Books, November 5, 1998) In Back When We Were Grownups (2001) a mother of a large family, Rebecca Davitch, discovers that "she had turned into the wrong person." Rebecca is a grandmother, "wide and soft and dimpled, with two short wings of dry, fair hair flaring almost horizontally from a center part." She doesn't believe that it is too late to make changes and tries to find her true self from her past.

Most of Tyler's novels have been set in Baltimore, Maryland, where she lives. Baltimore's Roland Park is also one of the places where her characters live, including Macon Leary of The Accidental Tourist, Delia Grinstead from Ladder of Years, and the Peck Family in Searching for Caleb. Muriel Pritchett from the Accidental Tourist, the Tull family in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Rebecca Davitch in Back When We Were Grownuops reside in Chares Village. The opening scene of Ladder of Years takes place in Roland Park, an epitome of "upper-middle-class

- 13 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Waspdom in all its glory" (Gerson Nason in The Independent, 19 January 2003). Digging to America (2006) was a story of two families, the Iranian-born Yazdans and the Donaldsons, who are connected by adopted Korean girls. Tyler's 18th novel, Noah's Compass (2010), tells of a 60-year-old man who finds again his joy of living after losing his job and being attacked in his apartment. In 2011 Tyler became a nominee for the the prestigious Man Booker prize. The Beginner's Goodbye (2012) captures the attention of the reader with the sentence: "The strangest thing about my wife's return from the dead was how other people reacted." The narrator, Aaron Woolcott, has lost his wife Dorothy in an accident, and tries to pull himself together and resume his life after the loss.

DIGGING TO AMERICA Digging to America is a story set in Baltimore, Maryland about two very different families’ experiences with adoption and their relationships with each other. Sami and Ziba Yazdan, an Iranian-American family, and Brad and Bitsy Dickinson-Donaldson, an all-American suburban family, meet at the airport on the day their infant daughters arrive from Korea to begin life in America. The two families become friends and begin a tradition of celebrating the arrival of their adopted daughters each year.

The differences between the two families are apparent from the beginning, especially in the way each couple decides to raise their daughters.

- 14 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

MacCULLERS, Carson The Ballad of the sad café BIOGRAPHY American author who examined the psychology of lonely, isolated people. McCullers published only eight books. Her best known novels are The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), which she wrote at the age of twenty-two, and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1942), set in a military base.

Lula Carson Smith (Carson McCullers) was born in Columbus, Georgia, the daughter of a well-to-do watchmaker and jeweler of French Huguenot extraction. From the age of five McCullers took piano lessons and at the age of 17 she moved to New York to study piano at Juilliard School of Music. However, she never attended the school – she managed to lose the money set aside for her tuition. McCullers worked in menial jobs and studied creative writing at Columbia and New York universities. In 1936 she published in Story magazine an autobiographical piece, 'Wunderkind,' which depicted a musical prodigy's failure and adolescent insecurity.

In 1937 she married Reeves McCullers, a failed author. Before the wedding she him told her parents that she did not want to marry him until she first had experienced sex with him. "The sexual experience was not like D.H. Lawrence," she later said. "No grand explosions or colored lights, but it gave me a chance to know Reeves better, and really learn to love him." They moved to North Carolina, living there for two years. During this time she wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a novel in the Southern Gothic tradition. The title, suggested by McCullers's editor, was taken from Fiona MacLeod's poem 'The Lonely Hunter'.

Set in the 1930s in a small mill town, similar to Charlotte of the 1930s, the story tells about an adolescent girl with a passion to study music. Other major characters include an unsuccessful socialist agitator, a black physician struggling to maintain his personal dignity, a widower who owns a cafe, and John Singer, the deaf-mute protagonist, who is confidante of people who talk to him about loneliness and misery. When Singer's Greek mute friend goes insane, Singer is left alone. He takes a room with the Kelly family, where he is visited by the town's misfits. After discovering that his mute friend has died, Singer shoots himself – there is no one left to communicate with him.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was interpreted as an anti-fascist book when it came out. In 1968 it was filmed with Alan Arkin in the lead role. Reflections in a Golden Eye was directed by John Huston (1967), starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. Some of the film was shot in New York City and on Long Island, where Huston was permitted to use an abandoned Army installation. Many of the interiors and some of the exteriors were done in Italy. "I first met Carson McCullers during the war when I was visiting Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith in upstate New York," said Huston in An Open Book (1980). "Carson lived nearby, and one day when Buzz and I were out for a walk she hailed us from her doorway. She was then in her early twenties, and

- 15 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

had already suffered the first of series of strokes that made her an invalid before she was thirty. I remember her as a fragile thing with great shining eyes, and a tremor in her hand as she placed it in mine. It wasn't palsy, rather a quiver of animal timidity. But there was nothing timid or frail about the manner in which Carson McCullers faced life. And as her affections multiplied, she only grew stronger."

McCullers's marriage turned out to be unlucky. Both she and her husband had homosexual relationships. They separated in 1940. McCullers moved to New York to live with George Davis, the editor of Harper's Bazaar. In Brooklyn McCullers became a member of the art commune February House. Among their friends were W.H. Auden, Paul and Jane Bowles, and the burlesque stripper Gipsy Rose Lee. After World War II McCullers lived mostly in Paris. Her close friends during these years included Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.

In 1945 McCullers remarried with Reeves. Three years later McCullers became so depressed she attempted suicide. Reeves killed himself in a Paris hotel in 1953 with an overdose of sleeping pills. McCullers's bitter-sweet play The Square Root of Wonderful (1958) was an attempt to examine these traumatic experiences. The Member of the Wedding (1946) described the feelings of a young girl at her brother's wedding. The Broadway production of the novella had a successful run in 195051. McCullers's best short stories include 'Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland,' collected in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951). The title story, a novella, tells of a strong woman, Miss Amelia Evans, who falls in love with a hunchback, Cousin Lymon. At the end he destroys Miss Amelia's cafe with his lover, her former husband.

McCullers suffered throughout her life from several illnesses – she had contracted rheumatic fever at the age of fifteen and a series of strokes left her a virtual invalid in her early 30's. Carson McCullers died in New York on September 29, 1967, after a stroke and a resultant brain haemorrhage. Her final novel was Clock Without Hands (1961), which was a bestseller, but received mixed review. Sweet as a Picle and Clean as a Pig (1964) was a collection of children's verse. Her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare (1999), she dictated during her final months.

Although McCullers's oeuvre is often described as "Southern Gothic," she produced her famous works after leaving the South. Her eccentric characters suffer from loneliness that is interpreted with deep empathy. In a discussion with the Irish critic and writer Terence De Vere White she confessed: "Writing, for me, is a search for God." This search was not acknowledged by all of her colleagues – Arthur Miller dismissed her a "minor author," but Gore Vidal praised her work as ''one of the few satisfying achievements of our second-rate culture.''

THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFÉ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe opens in a small, isolated Georgia town. The story introduces Miss Amelia Evans, a strong character of both body and mind, who is approached by a hunchbacked man with only a suitcase in hand who claims to be of kin.

When Miss Amelia, whom the townspeople see as a calculating woman who never acts without reason, takes the stranger into her home, rumors begin to circulate that Miss Amelia has only done so to take what the hunchback had in his suitcase. When the rumors hit their peak, a group of eight men come to her store, sitting outside on the steps for the day and waiting to see if somethng would happen.

- 16 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Finally, they enter the store all at once and are stunned to see that the hunchback is actually alive and well. With everyone gathered inside, Miss Amelia brings out some liquor and crackers in hospitality, which further shocks the men, as they have never witnessed Miss Amelia be hospitable enough to allow drinking inside her home. This is essentially the beginning of the cafĂŠ. Miss Amelia and the hunchback, Cousin Lymon, unintentionally create a new tradition for the town, and the people gather inside at the cafĂŠ on Sunday evenings often until midnight.

- 17 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

UPDIKE, John

Terrorist BIOGRAPHY His pen rarely at rest, John Updike has been publishing fiction, essays, and poetry since the mid-fifties, when he was a staff writer at the New Yorker, contributing material for the “Talk of the Town” sections. “Of all modern American writers,” writes Adam Gopnik in Humanities magazine, “Updike comes closest to meeting Virginia Woolf’s demand that a writer’s only job is to get himself, or herself, expressed without impediments."

Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, published in 1989, paints the landscape of his boyhood in Shillington, on the outskirts of Reading, southwest of the formerly solid mill town and extending into Pennsylvania Dutch farm country. But Updike’s interests pulled him north and east— first, toward the Reading Museum, within walking distance of his hometown (the fictional Olinger, which is the setting for many early short stories), and then, with a full scholarship in hand, to Harvard University, where, as an English major, he did a thesis on seventeenth-century English poet Robert Herrick, and graduated summa cum laude in 1954.

He has had a sustained and sustaining interest in art, beginning in childhood when he had his first drawing lessons and, as a devotee of comic strips, wrote a perspicacious fan letter to the creator of “Little Orphan Annie,” Harold Gray. Much later, at the Harvard Lampoon, of which he was president in his senior year, he was still at it. In one of his Lampoon cartoons, two apparent seekers of universal awareness sit cross-legged and side by side, both clad in loose, open garb most appropriate for meditation, and one says to the other, “Don’t look now, but I think my navel is contemplating me.” During that senior year, Lampoon staff recall, he wrote about two-thirds of every issue. At Harvard he took art classes with Hyman Bloom, a painter who was associated with a style known as Boston Expressionism. Then a Knox Fellowship gave Updike the wherewithal to study for a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art in Oxford, England. Painting had taught him, he once said, “how difficult it is to see things exactly as they are, and that the painting is ‘there’ as a book is not.”

In Just Looking, 1989, and Still Looking, 2005, Updike gathered the impressions he’s been making over a lifetime of observing painting and sculpture. In an essay in the former he captures in limpid prose Vermeer’s achievement in paint in View of Delft: “an instant of flux forever held.” And in the latter, in a chapter on Jackson Pollock, Updike glimpses, and so we do, too, the essence of what Pollock’s drip-painting could accomplish—“an image, in dots and lines and little curdled clouds of dull color, of the cosmos.” His interest in art has also shown in his fiction. One of his later novels, Seek My Face, 2002, follows the lines of the life of an aging painter who often lived in the shadows of her more famous husband, also a painter. In The Witches of Eastwick, 1984, the novel’s hero, the devil, in the form of one Darryl Van Horne, is an ecstatic collector of Pop art. “I suppose,” - 18 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

Updike has said, “since I was an aspiring cartoonist once, I could ‘relate’ . . . to the Pop art imagery.

Witches takes place in a post-Pop art time, so in a sense dust has gathered on the movement, which was fairly short-lived.” Harold Bloom has called The Witches of Eastwick one of Updike’s most remarkable books, as all of his “themes and images coalesce in a rich, resonant swirl.” Of Witches Updike himself remarked that “the touch of magical realism gave it a kind of spriteliness for me.”

About his fiction in general he has said, “My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me—to give the mundane its beautiful due.” When considering the entire scope of his work, readers of American fiction are most often put in mind of Harry Angstrom, the character from the Rabbit saga with whom Updike seemed for many years to be on closest, if often contentious, terms.

American novelist Joyce Carol Oates has written that Updike is “a master, like Flaubert, of mesmerizing us with his narrative voice even as he might repel us with the vanities of human desire his scalpel exposes.” British novelist Martin Amis has seen the hand of a master in Rabbit at Rest, 1990, marveling, “This novel is enduringly eloquent about weariness, age and disgust, in a prose that is always fresh, nubile, and unwitherable.”

Avid readers and admirers also point to many other works in his eclectic oeuvre as masterpieces, including The Centaur, 1963, set, as are the Rabbit novels, in Pennsylvania and winner of France’s prize for best foreign book; Couples, 1968, set in the fictional Tarbox, modeled after Ipswich, Massachusetts, where Updike and his first wife and family moved from Manhattan in 1957; and Roger’s Version, 1986, which magisterially sets a middle-aged divinity professor and a computer whiz kid bent on proving the existence of God on a metaphysical collision course.

He is known to many first as an author of short stories, with dozens having graced the pages of the New Yorker before being published in collections. Many other readers know his shorter fiction either through the O. Henry Prize Stories or anthologies of American literature, where they would have entered into the at times sad, at times triumphant thoughts of, say, a certain check-out clerk at the local grocery store; “A & P” serving as a model of dramatic irony for at least two generations of English literature teachers.

Updike is, of course, also an accomplished literary critic, whose reviews and essays are as much distinguished by their breadth of understanding as by their charitable disposition. Examples of his critical acumen frequently appear in The New York Review of Books, and he received his second National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for Hugging the Shore, including such gems as the micro-essay “A Mild ‘Complaint,’” which skewers the misuses and ‘misusers’ of ‘scare quotes.’

He has also applied his habile wit to poetry, composing early on a collection called The Carpentered Hen in 1954. Three more tomes of verse followed. Collected Poems, 1953-1993, comprises what he calls his “beloved waifs.”

After having met Katharine White, fiction editor at the New Yorker during his year of study at the Ruskin School, he began submitting stories regularly to the magazine and then settled in an apartment in Manhattan for his two-year stint there.

Migrating from Gotham to Ipswich, he thrived amid salubrious sea breezes and continued to publish at the rate he set for himself early in his career, about a book a year. It was during this time, roughly 1957 to 1970 that he published The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit Run, Pigeon Feathers, The Centaur, and Bech: A Book, introducing readers to his irreverent alter ego, Henry Bech.

If minute attention to craftsmanship has always been a hallmark of Updike’s work, so have inventiveness and creative unpredictability. After moving to Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, with his second wife, Martha, in 1982, he brought forth work that differed widely in subject matter and

- 19 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

setting: In the Beauty of the Lilies, 1996, a multigenerational, twentieth century-spanning family saga summing up increasingly secular, movie-mad America; Toward the End of Time, 1997, set in a near-future, post-nuclear war New England with menacing undercurrents; Gertrude and Claudius, 2000, concerned with the earlier life of Hamlet’s mother, Claudius, and Old Hamlet; and Terrorist, 2006, featuring the radicalized Islamist teenage son of an absent Arab father and an Irish-American mother.

In the half century he has been writing he has garnered many literary prizes, awards, and honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, twice each; the Pen Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story; and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is among a select few to have received both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. Albright College in Reading (the fictional Brewer readers first encountered in Rabbit Run) bestowed upon him an honorary Litt.D. degree in 1982.

Along with his finely tuned regard for painting, which has often provided the visual element for his fiction, there has been a deep and abiding appreciation of the reading life in general and a love of the book in particular. He has alluded to an imagined reader of his, ideal or otherwise, as being a teenage boy who happens upon one of his books on the dusty shelves of some library one afternoon looking for literary adventure. In a speech two years ago at the American Booksellers Association convention, he encouraged beleaguered booksellers to “defend [their] lonely forts. . . .

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity.”

In fall 2007 Updike came out with a collection of essays, Due Considerations. A new novel, The Widows of Eastwick, is due out in fall 2008. After so many words, is America’s leading man of letters even marginally at rest? No, he is still looking and still writing.

TERRORIST The story centers on an American-born Muslim teenager named Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, although Ahmad’s high school guidance counselor, Jack Levy, also plays a central role. The novel seeks to explore the worldview and motivations of religious fundamentalists(specifically within Islam), while at the same time dissecting the morals and lifeways of residents of the fictional decaying New Jersey Rust Belt suburb of "New Prospect".

- 20 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

WOOLF, Virginia

Mrs. Dalloway BIOGRAPHY Born into a privileged English household in 1882, writer Virginia Woolf was raised by freethinking parents. She began writing as a young girl and published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. Her nonlinear, free form prose style inspired her peers and earned her much praise.

She was also known for her mood swings and bouts of deep depression. She committed suicide in 1941, at the age of 59.

Virginia Woolf’s dance between literary expression and personal desolation would continue for the rest of her life.

When Virginia was in her early 20s, her sister Vanessa and brother Adrian sold the family home in Hyde Park Gate, and purchased a house in the Bloomsbury area of London. Through her siblings’ connections, Virginia became acquainted with several members of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of intellectuals and artists who became famous in 1910 for their Dreadnought hoax, a practical joke in which members of the group dressed up as a delegation of Ethiopian royals and successfully persuaded the English Royal Navy to show them their warship, the HMS Dreadnought.

Woolf disguised herself as a bearded man. After the outrageous act, Leonard Woolf, a writer and a member of the group, took a fancy to Virginia. By 1912, she and Leonard were married. The two shared a passionate love for one another for the rest of their lives.

Several years before marrying Leonard, Virginia had begun working on her first novel. The original title was Melymbrosia. After nine years and innumerable drafts, it was released in 1915 as The Voyage Out. Woolf used the book to experiment with several literary tools, including compelling and unusual narrative perspectives, dream-states and free association prose. In 1925, Mrs. Dalloway, her fourth novel, was released to rave reviews. The mesmerizing story interweaves interior monologues and raises issues of feminism, mental illness and homosexuality in post-World War I England. Since it first went press, Mrs. Dalloway has been turned into a movie (1997) and been the subject of a Michael Cunningham novel and film, The Hours (2002).

Throughout her career, Woolf spoke regularly at colleges and universities, penned dramatic letters, wrote moving essays and self-published a long list of short stories. By her mid-forties, she had established herself as both an intellectual and an innovative thinker and writer. Her ability to balance dream-like scenes with deeply tense plot lines earned her incredible respect from peers and the public alike. success, she continued to regularly suffer from bouts of depression and dramatic mood swings.

Woolf's husband, Leonard, always at her side, was quite aware of any signs that pointed to his wife’s internal demise. He saw, as she was working on what would be her final manuscript (published posthumously), Between the Acts, she was sinking into a bottomless pit. Leonard, who

- 21 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

was Jewish, was certainly in danger of being captured by the Nazis, and the couple’s London home had been destroyed during the Blitz. These seemingly insurmountable facts motivated Woolf's decision to, on March 28, 1941, pull on her overcoat, walk out into the River Ouse and fill her pockets with stones. As she waded into the water, the stream took her with it. The authorities found her some three weeks later. Although her popularity decreased after World War II, her stories rang true again for readers during the feminist movement of the 1970s. Woolf remains one of the most well known authors of the 21st century.

MRS. DALLOWAY Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925[1]) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post-World War I England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.

Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister," the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure. In October 2005, Mrs Dalloway was included on Timemagazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923.

- 22 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

SHARPE, Tom

The Wilt inheritance BIOGRAPHY Tom Sharpe, who has died aged 85, was in the great tradition of English comic novelists and his bawdy style and vulgar approach were said to have made bad taste into an art form – like "PG Wodehouse on acid", in the words of one critic.

Sharpe did not start writing comic novels until 1971, when he was 43, but once he got going he gained a large readership. He was a huge bestseller whose hardback editions sold like most authors only sell in paperback.

Wilt (1976) introduced perhaps his most popular character: Henry Wilt, a mild-mannered teacher of literature at the fictional Fenland College of Arts and Technology, who gets involved in a murder investigation. Sharpe claimed that the account of teaching day-release apprentice butchers and tradesmen in classes timetabled as "Meat One" and "Plasterers Two" was based on his own experiences as a lecturer at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology.

Henry Wilt has a plain common sense that gives a touch of ordinary, everyday reality to the novel and its sequels – The Wilt Alternative (1979), Wilt on High (1984), Wilt in Nowhere (2004) and The Wilt Inheritance (2010) – which is often lacking in Sharpe's wilder farcical flights such as The Throwback (1978) and Ancestral Vices (1980). A film of Wilt, starring Griff Rhys Jones in 1989, brought Sharpe an even wider audience, as did the TV adaptations of his novels Blott on the Landscape (starring David Suchet in 1985) and Porterhouse Blue (starring Ian Richardson and David Jason in 1987).

Surprisingly for a comic writer and such a jovial character, Sharpe came to attention first as a hero in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa in 1960. After leaving Cambridge with a degree in history and social anthropology, he had gone, in 1951, to South Africa, where he did social work for the Non-European Affairs Department, witnessing many of the horrors inflicted on the black population. He taught in Natal for a time and then set up a photographic studio in Pietermaritzburg in 1957.

He wrote a political play, The South Africans, which criticised the country's racial policy.

Although it was not produced in South Africa, and had only a small production in London, it was enough to bring down on him the wrath of the Bureau of State Security. He was hounded by the secret police, spent the Christmas of 1960 in jail, and was deported back to Britain in 1961. The ship he was put on sailed along the South African coast stopping at every port, at each of which the police would come on board to question and attempt to intimidate Sharpe.

He had written many symbolic, and unproduced, plays in South Africa and he was, he said, as surprised as anyone when in just three weeks he wrote the novel Riotous Assembly (1971), a

- 23 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

dazzling comic send-up of the South African police. The inspiration for the book came from hearing about the old-fashioned English colonial aunt of a friend of his who lived near the police station and complained that the screams of tortured prisoners disturbed her afternoon naps. The aunt came to life in the book as the eccentric Miss Hazelstone, who amazes a police chief, Kommandant Van Heerden, when she says she wants to be arrested for murder because she has shot and killed her Zulu cook. In a marvellous piece of irony, Sharpe dedicated the book to "the South African police force whose lives are dedicated to the preservation of western civilisation in southern Africa".

He was teaching then at the Arts and Technology college, but was able to give up his job because his publisher, Secker and Warburg (now Harvill Secker), agreed to pay him ÂŁ3,000 a year for three years to be a full-time writer. Tom Rosenthal at Secker had faith that Sharpe would become a bestseller.

Sharpe continued his noble crusade against racism in South Africa with Indecent Exposure (1973), in which Kommandant van Heerden returns under the mistaken impression that he had been given "the heart of an English gentleman" in a transplant operation, a new persona which manifests itself when he starts reading the British novelist Dornford Yates.

Readers thought Sharpe perhaps a one-subject writer, but with Porterhouse Blue (1974), set in a Cambridge college, he proved that he was a true comic novelist in the great English tradition.

"If Wodehouse wrote a plot and [Evelyn] Waugh wrote a book around it, the result could hardly be more hilarious," wrote a critic for Time magazine.

Sharpe continued his dissection of English life with Blott on the Landscape (1975), a farce on urban development and the spoiling of the English countryside. After the first Wilt novel he produced The Great Pursuit (1977) which, in spite of the romping nature of the tale, was a serious attempt at satirising FR Leavis and the 20th century's replacement of religion with literature. Sharpe was keen on the idea of both writing and reading as fun. In spite of abusing Yates in Indecent Exposure, his favourable comments on the author were plastered all over Dent's Classic Thrillers reprints of Yates's books. Sharpe's 1982 novel Vintage Stuff was an excellent send-up of Sapper's Bulldog Drummond and John Buchan's Richard Hannay.

Born in Croydon, south London, Sharpe had a most unusual and troubled boyhood. His father, the Unitarian minister Reverend George Coverdale Sharpe, was a fascist, a follower of Oswald Mosley and a great believer in Adolf Hitler. From the start of the second world war, the family was continuously on the move to avoid the father being interned with other British Nazis.

Tom's mother, Grace, was South African and a rich South African aunt paid for him to go to Lancing college, West Sussex. During that time, he wore a German army belt with Gott Mit Uns on the buckle. He said that when he went to the seaside he used to daydream of scrambling over the barbed wire and swimming across the Channel to occupied France to "join the good guys".

Sharpe's father did not live to see the liberation of the Nazi death camps, but Tom, of course, saw the newsreels and came close to having a nervous breakdown. Looking back on his schooldays, he said that the most significant thing that happened was a friendly master giving him Waugh's Decline and Fall to read. It had, he said, a tremendous influence when he came to write his own comedies. His other influence was Wodehouse; he was very pleased later to learn that Wodehouse was a reader of his.

He did his national service from 1946 to 1948 in the Royal Marines, and went to Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was married for a short time in South Africa and then in 1969 married Nancy Anne Looper from North Carolina. They had three daughters.

- 24 -

Tertulia literaria en anglès, 2013 -2014

Biblioteca Tirant lo Blanc, Montgat

When he started producing bestsellers he moved to a large house in Dorset, a former school building, and became a keen gardener. He said he liked digging. He moved back to Cambridge but in the 1980s he had an experience like something out of one of his own novels when he had a heart attack live on TV in Spain.

Ill health was undoubtedly responsible for the long silence, from Wilt on High in 1984 to Grantchester Grind in 1995, in which Sharpe – who was used to producing a book a year – published nothing at all. He commented that it wasn't that at all, it was being forced to give up smoking. He later said that the sort of ballpoint pens he wrote with were no longer manufactured and asked readers to send him their own pens. He then said that he kept writing every day of those 11 years but did not think the work good enough. Grantchester Grind was a sequel to Porterhouse Blue, and it was followed by The Midden in 1996. In the following decade, two further Wilt novels appeared.

Much in demand for interviews and often besieged by fans, he developed two mask-like personas. One was a blustering ex-colonial type, the other a genial old buffer. One interviewer, arriving on one of the ex-colonial days, said he had never seen anyone fuming before in real life.

Sharpe said he admired the old military men, but thought of himself as the buffer.

THE WILT INHERITANCE

Wilt is a comedic novel by the author Tom Sharpe. The novel's title refers to its main character, Henry Wilt. Wilt is a demoralized and professionally under-rated assistant lecturer who teaches literature to uninterested construction apprentices at a community college in the south of England.

- 25 -