Theodore Solotaroff died last Friday, and while his name was only vaguely familiar to me -- a member of the New York literary world, yes, but what were his accomplishments, exactly? -- James Wolcott's soaring evocation of The New American Review, the magazine Solotaroff founded in 1967 and which lasted a decade, make his literary contributions abidingly clear: In the first issue alone, Wolcott writes, there appeared:
Stanley Kauffmann's memoir of his brief, contested tenure as chief drama critic of The New York Times; a story by Grace Paley; an excerpt from a novel in progress by Mordecai Richler; an excerpt from a novel in progress by Philip Roth, the n-in-p being Portnoy's Complaint ("Sometime during my ninth year one of my testicles apparently decided it had enough of life down in the scrotum and began to make its way north" -- now there's an attention-snagging opening sentence); William Gass's novella "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country;" a story by Ron Sukenick; an essay by George Dennison on Jean Genet; an essay review by Richard Gilman of the controversial "Macbird!"; an essay by Conor Cruise O'Brien on Edmund Burke and Karl Marx; a student's account of an appearance by Norman Mailer at a graduate school ("He had come to talk to us of style and everyone was full of it, up to the ears in all kinds of manners, modes, and means; the room blossomed smiles, bourbon, questions..."); and poems by Anne Sexton, Robert Graves, John Ashbery, Richard Eberhart, and Anna Akhmatova. Not bad for a first go.
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