http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/books/05/25/jules.feiffer/
Jules Feiffer: A cartoonist's 'Sick' outlook
Todd Leopold, CNN
May 25, 2010
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Jules Feiffer rose to fame as cartoonist for focusing on politics, urban neurosis
"It was an accident of timing," he says, but strip was influential, leading to Doonesbury, others
Mother and religion became themes in new memoir despite himself
Though comics have taken hit, Feiffer optimistic on form: "May well be one of the golden ages"
(CNN) -- The comic strip was originally called Sick Sick Sick, but it wasn't about ghouls or horror or any of that "Tales from the Crypt"-type stuff.
In the Eisenhower era, its subject matter was even scarier: Neurosis. Conformity. Politics. Oppressive mothers.
Much to cartoonist Jules Feiffer's surprise, as he recalls in his new memoir, "Backing into Forward," the strip -- a weekly feature in a then-new "alternative" newspaper called the Village Voice -- caught on. And Feiffer found himself a spokesman for intellectuals and misfits, all those people who dared to question the status quo.
"It was an accident of timing," said Feiffer, 81. "I happened to come along at what was considered at the time the very bland, conformist '50s. Nobody understood -- maybe I didn't -- that underground, beyond all that conformity, all these things were happening."
He became one of the most influential cartoonists of the latter half of the 20th century, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his long-running artistic commentaries. Doonesbury, in particular, owes Feiffer a debt -- one Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau has frequently acknowledged -- and so do any number of other cartoonists.
"I think his work was groundbreaking," Mutts cartoonist Patrick McDonnell said, adding that one of his earliest memories was perusing the book compilation of Sick Sick Sick. "I think he was the first cartoonist who really did sophisticated, more adult-oriented themes [that were] kind of autobiographical. And today, I think the whole underground and alternative graphic novel comes from Jules."
Lucy Shelton Caswell, curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at The Ohio State University, echoes McDonnell. "He studied at the feet of a couple of the masters -- Milton Caniff and Will Eisner -- and he took what he learned from them and made it his own," she said. "In terms of artistic style and content, he really made a difference."
Feiffer is quick to acknowledge his influences: Walt Kelly's Pogo, with its politically aware animal residents of the Okefenokee Swamp; New Yorker cartoonists such as Saul Steinberg and William Steig; and especially Eisner, the Spirit creator for whom Feiffer worked in the late '40s and under whom he drew his own strip, Clifford.
But there's one influence that's unique to Feiffer: his mother, Rhoda.
Telling stories about his mother wasn't Feiffer's intention. "The two things I knew I wasn't going to write about was my mother and my Jewishness," he said. "And, of course, they became the central themes of the book."
But as he cast his mind back to his working-class Bronx childhood, one memory leading to another, Rhoda Feiffer was hard to avoid. She was a cold, belittling, commanding woman who had given up her own artistic dreams and was convinced that her son, like his father, was doomed to disappointment.
"I've suspected for a long time that mine was a virginal birth," Jules Feiffer writes in "Backing into Forward."
Her influence played out in any number of his strips featuring put-upon men, questioning children and recurring characters such as his dancer, forever offering "a dance to" something and being cruelly awakened in the final panel.
I think the whole underground and alternative graphic novel comes from Jules.
--Mutts cartoonist Patrick McDonnell on Jules Feiffer
But the real-life Feiffer was also equipped with a sense of perseverance and adventure. In "Backing into Forward," he writes of hitchhiking across the country in his late teens; avoiding the worst aspects of military service by playing into the vanity of his superiors (he and a pal painted elaborate helmet liners); and branching out into other genres, including playwriting, screenwriting and children's books. It has paid off with such classics as the play "Little Murders," the screenplay for "Carnal Knowledge" and such books as "The Phantom Tollbooth" (for which Feiffer did the illustrations) and "Bark, George."
"I think the diversity of his output is very interesting. He has been able to find publishers for work that I think is quite remarkable, given the incredible range of subject matter. It's interesting that someone who makes such pointed political commentary can write such charming children's books," Caswell said.
Indeed, Feiffer has often taken unlikely paths. His strip was never widely syndicated and always kept its base in the Voice. And when he's done the expected thing -- for a short time, he used his characters in advertisements, not unusual for cartoonists -- he's backed off.
"A lot of people don't see advertising as I do," which is as manipulative and deceptive, he says. "If I was trying do cartoons [to] tell the truth and then do an ad, I can't defend that."
He and Charles Schulz disagreed about the use of Schulz's Peanuts characters -- ironically, as questioning and neurotic as Feiffer's -- in ads, with Feiffer saying he was "very upset" with Schulz's merchandising. The two were admirers of each other, though, he adds.
In recent years, Feiffer has been a victim of newspapers' decline, with his strip unceremoniously dumped by the cost-cutting Voice in 1997. (It's a far cry from the treatment his idols received; Caniff earned the cover of Time magazine when he ended Terry and the Pirates in favor of Steve Canyon.) But you won't find Feiffer, who now teaches a course called Humor and Truth at Stony Brook Southampton, looking at the glass half-empty.
"This may well be one of the golden ages of the form," he said. Though he observed that newspaper comic strips are struggling, such alt-comic artists and graphic novelists as Chris Ware, Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman have given cartooning new life, he says.
Indeed, one of the reasons for teaching -- and writing the book, for that matter -- is to encourage young people so they don't hear the cautionary voices of their own mothers, and other grown-ups, too loudly, he says.
So, could it be that Jules Feiffer -- chronicler of the fearful, the anxious, the uneasy -- is an optimist?
He seems surprised at the question.
"Oh, God. If I wasn't optimistic about the work I was doing, and the eventual success of it, how in the world could I have this career?"
Showing posts with label Pulitzer Prize. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pulitzer Prize. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Most Awesome Pulitzer Prize of the Year
SPECIAL CITATION: Country music pioneer Hank Williams
Williams "expressed universal feelings with poignant simplicity" and transformed country music into a major musical and cultural force in America, The Pulitzer board said.
The board said it awarded the late singer for his lifetime achievement after a confidential survey of experts in popular music.
Williams died Jan. 1, 1953, at the age of 29, cutting short a career that changed country music. Hits such as "Your Cheatin' Heart," "Cold, Cold Heart" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" have been covered by hundreds of musicians, and more than 55 years after his death, he remains a central figure in country music.
Source: Associated Press
Williams "expressed universal feelings with poignant simplicity" and transformed country music into a major musical and cultural force in America, The Pulitzer board said.
The board said it awarded the late singer for his lifetime achievement after a confidential survey of experts in popular music.
Williams died Jan. 1, 1953, at the age of 29, cutting short a career that changed country music. Hits such as "Your Cheatin' Heart," "Cold, Cold Heart" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" have been covered by hundreds of musicians, and more than 55 years after his death, he remains a central figure in country music.
Source: Associated Press
Friday, October 2, 2009
Political Columnist William Safire Dies At 79
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113255309
Political Columnist William Safire Dies At 79
by David Folkenflik
September 27, 2009
William Safire, the savvy speech stylist who turned phrases for President Nixon and later conjured up Pulitzer Prize-winning contrarian columns for The New York Times, died Sunday at 79. Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty said he died of pancreatic cancer at a hospice in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington, D.C.
"I join with my father in saying how much everyone at The New York Times is saddened by Bill Safire's death," New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in a written statement. "For decades, Bill's columns ... delighted our readers with his insightful political commentary, his thoughtful analysis of our national discourse and, of course, his wonderful sermons on the use and abuse of language. Bill will be greatly missed."
Safire is perhaps best known now as the first true conservative columnist for The New York Times or as the phrase-parsing wordsmith for the Times' Sunday magazine in his column on language usage. But Safire's life and career served up ample proof that there are second — and even third — acts in American life.
He was born in New York City on Dec. 17, 1929, as William Safir, but later added the "e" to match his name's spelling to pronunciation. Safire attended Syracuse University, started public life as a reporter and, after a stint in the U.S. Army and then another turn as a reporter, became a resourceful publicist; and then he got a big break.
In 1959, at the Moscow World's Fair, he lured the young American Vice President Richard Nixon into the model home built by Safire's client.
A crush of reporters trapped Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The ensuing "kitchen debate" between the two drew international attention for the combative American politician — as well as plenty of headlines for the home builder.
The former vice president, impressed, stayed in touch and Safire found himself writing speeches for Nixon's successful presidential campaign in 1968. That November, Safire took a story from the campaign trail and wove it into Nixon's victory speech. The president-elect spoke of a small town he had visited:
"Five times the population was there in the dust," Nixon recalled. "Almost impossible to see, but a teenager held up the sign: 'Bring us together.' And that will be the great objective of this administration at the outset, to bring the American people together."
Safire joined a White House press office stocked with talented and now-famous figures, including Patrick Buchanan, Diane Sawyer and David Gergen. And Safire was particularly playful as he drafted speeches for key White House officials. But many of them, rather than drawing Americans together, were caustic and divisive during a time of wars and mass protests.
One classic Safire coinage surfaced in a speech he wrote for Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was lashing out at critics of the Nixon administration. Safire decided to lean on alliteration as Agnew memorably dismissed the "nattering nabobs of negativism." (A nabob, naturally, being a governor of an Indian state during the Mogul empire.)
"The code of the speechwriters is, you never claim a phrase," Safire told NPR's Renee Montagne in 2008. "But the vice president did say, 'I got that from Safire.' And it was either that or 'the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.' And he went with the better one."
Safire left the Nixon administration in early 1973 and began writing periodic columns for The Washington Post. Later that year, as the Watergate abuses of power scandal continued to snowball, Arthur Sulzberger Sr., publisher of The New York Times, tapped him to become the paper's first conservative op-ed columnist. It caused a small uproar within the paper and journalism circles. Such leading writers as former Times reporter David Halberstam argued it was a betrayal to hire a Nixon apologist — someone who had crafted rhetoric for an administration whose abuses of power were becoming more evident.
For conservatives and Republicans, his presence at the Times gave them hope.
"Here he was just sitting smack dab in the middle of this very liberal newspaper, and giving no quarter nor asking for any, and writing just what he thought about conservative issues and not backing down," former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein told NPR when Safire retired from his political column in 2005. "And this was a great beacon to us in the years of darkness."
And Safire's critics started to cool down when it emerged that his telephones had been tapped, too.
Safire did indeed write largely in favor of Republican and conservative causes, but a strong libertarian streak led him to avoid any orthodoxy. He frequently trumpeted subsequent presidential scandals, largely but not exclusively involving Democrats, such as "Lance-gate" — the banking affair that dragged down Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter's budget director.
Safire won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1978 for those columns; as the selection committee dryly put it, his writing was "credited with compelling the Carter Administration to rethink the career of Mr. Lance." And yet the episode was revealing in another way, too. Sharp-edged in print, Safire was quite amiable in person. The writer and disgraced presidential staffer later became close friends.
Over the years, Safire devised other memorable coinages: For example, he called then-first lady Hillary Clinton "a congenital liar" for saying she had not wanted to fire members of the White House travel staff in an early flap of the Clinton presidency. And he also pursued his own fixed ideas, even when others believed they were untrue. He wrote favorably several times about the claim that a key al-Qaida plotter had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence official ahead of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Although Bush administration officials cited it to help justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Czech government said it couldn't vouch for the incident, and the 9/11 Commission concluded there was no credible evidence it occurred.
But Safire would not be defined by politics alone. Since 1979, he wrote a weekly language column for the Sunday Times magazine section, and he also wrote historical novels, spy thrillers and political dictionaries.
It was all part of his lifelong drive to explore language and meaning. Safire once told NPR that political rhetoric sought out "word pictures."
"For example, when somebody 'leaves under a cloud.' That's been used so often that it lost its punch," Safire said. "But when you say someone 'leaves in a hail of dead cats,' all of a sudden, that'll wake somebody up. And a vivid metaphor can make a speech, and also it can make a charge."
He is survived by his wife, the former Helene Belmar Julius, a model, pianist and jewelry designer; their two children, Mark and Annabel; and a granddaughter.
Political Columnist William Safire Dies At 79
by David Folkenflik
September 27, 2009
William Safire, the savvy speech stylist who turned phrases for President Nixon and later conjured up Pulitzer Prize-winning contrarian columns for The New York Times, died Sunday at 79. Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty said he died of pancreatic cancer at a hospice in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington, D.C.
"I join with my father in saying how much everyone at The New York Times is saddened by Bill Safire's death," New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in a written statement. "For decades, Bill's columns ... delighted our readers with his insightful political commentary, his thoughtful analysis of our national discourse and, of course, his wonderful sermons on the use and abuse of language. Bill will be greatly missed."
Safire is perhaps best known now as the first true conservative columnist for The New York Times or as the phrase-parsing wordsmith for the Times' Sunday magazine in his column on language usage. But Safire's life and career served up ample proof that there are second — and even third — acts in American life.
He was born in New York City on Dec. 17, 1929, as William Safir, but later added the "e" to match his name's spelling to pronunciation. Safire attended Syracuse University, started public life as a reporter and, after a stint in the U.S. Army and then another turn as a reporter, became a resourceful publicist; and then he got a big break.
In 1959, at the Moscow World's Fair, he lured the young American Vice President Richard Nixon into the model home built by Safire's client.
A crush of reporters trapped Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The ensuing "kitchen debate" between the two drew international attention for the combative American politician — as well as plenty of headlines for the home builder.
The former vice president, impressed, stayed in touch and Safire found himself writing speeches for Nixon's successful presidential campaign in 1968. That November, Safire took a story from the campaign trail and wove it into Nixon's victory speech. The president-elect spoke of a small town he had visited:
"Five times the population was there in the dust," Nixon recalled. "Almost impossible to see, but a teenager held up the sign: 'Bring us together.' And that will be the great objective of this administration at the outset, to bring the American people together."
Safire joined a White House press office stocked with talented and now-famous figures, including Patrick Buchanan, Diane Sawyer and David Gergen. And Safire was particularly playful as he drafted speeches for key White House officials. But many of them, rather than drawing Americans together, were caustic and divisive during a time of wars and mass protests.
One classic Safire coinage surfaced in a speech he wrote for Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was lashing out at critics of the Nixon administration. Safire decided to lean on alliteration as Agnew memorably dismissed the "nattering nabobs of negativism." (A nabob, naturally, being a governor of an Indian state during the Mogul empire.)
"The code of the speechwriters is, you never claim a phrase," Safire told NPR's Renee Montagne in 2008. "But the vice president did say, 'I got that from Safire.' And it was either that or 'the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.' And he went with the better one."
Safire left the Nixon administration in early 1973 and began writing periodic columns for The Washington Post. Later that year, as the Watergate abuses of power scandal continued to snowball, Arthur Sulzberger Sr., publisher of The New York Times, tapped him to become the paper's first conservative op-ed columnist. It caused a small uproar within the paper and journalism circles. Such leading writers as former Times reporter David Halberstam argued it was a betrayal to hire a Nixon apologist — someone who had crafted rhetoric for an administration whose abuses of power were becoming more evident.
For conservatives and Republicans, his presence at the Times gave them hope.
"Here he was just sitting smack dab in the middle of this very liberal newspaper, and giving no quarter nor asking for any, and writing just what he thought about conservative issues and not backing down," former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein told NPR when Safire retired from his political column in 2005. "And this was a great beacon to us in the years of darkness."
And Safire's critics started to cool down when it emerged that his telephones had been tapped, too.
Safire did indeed write largely in favor of Republican and conservative causes, but a strong libertarian streak led him to avoid any orthodoxy. He frequently trumpeted subsequent presidential scandals, largely but not exclusively involving Democrats, such as "Lance-gate" — the banking affair that dragged down Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter's budget director.
Safire won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1978 for those columns; as the selection committee dryly put it, his writing was "credited with compelling the Carter Administration to rethink the career of Mr. Lance." And yet the episode was revealing in another way, too. Sharp-edged in print, Safire was quite amiable in person. The writer and disgraced presidential staffer later became close friends.
Over the years, Safire devised other memorable coinages: For example, he called then-first lady Hillary Clinton "a congenital liar" for saying she had not wanted to fire members of the White House travel staff in an early flap of the Clinton presidency. And he also pursued his own fixed ideas, even when others believed they were untrue. He wrote favorably several times about the claim that a key al-Qaida plotter had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence official ahead of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Although Bush administration officials cited it to help justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Czech government said it couldn't vouch for the incident, and the 9/11 Commission concluded there was no credible evidence it occurred.
But Safire would not be defined by politics alone. Since 1979, he wrote a weekly language column for the Sunday Times magazine section, and he also wrote historical novels, spy thrillers and political dictionaries.
It was all part of his lifelong drive to explore language and meaning. Safire once told NPR that political rhetoric sought out "word pictures."
"For example, when somebody 'leaves under a cloud.' That's been used so often that it lost its punch," Safire said. "But when you say someone 'leaves in a hail of dead cats,' all of a sudden, that'll wake somebody up. And a vivid metaphor can make a speech, and also it can make a charge."
He is survived by his wife, the former Helene Belmar Julius, a model, pianist and jewelry designer; their two children, Mark and Annabel; and a granddaughter.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Rabbit is gone: writer John Updike dies
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/27/AR2009012701672.html
Rabbit is gone: writer John Updike dies
By Scott Malone
Reuters
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
BOSTON (Reuters) - John Updike, a leading writer of his generation who chronicled the drama of small-town American life with flowing and vivid prose, wit and a frank eye for sex, died on Tuesday of lung cancer. He was 76.
"It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning," said Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf, a unit of Random House. "He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed."
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author died in a hospice in Massachusetts, the state where he lived for more than half a century, prolific in his writing of novels, short stories, essays and criticism.
Updike's stories often focused on undercurrents of tension masked by the mundane surface of suburban America, which boomed in 1960s and 1970s as his career was taking off. Ripples of sexual tension were frequent.
An early short story, "A&P," chronicled an adolescent boy's inner turmoil when three bikini-clad teenage girls appeared in the supermarket where he worked.
"It's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach," Updike wrote, "and another thing in the cool of the A&P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor."
Updike's frank focus on sex came before the profound changes in U.S. culture of the late 1960s lifted some of the taboo from the topic. His publisher rewrote portions of his second novel, "Rabbit, Run," before its first printing out of fear of being charged with obscenity.
That novel introduced the fictional hero Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the subject of four Updike novels and a novella over four decades, which won him two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction.
'AMONG THE VERY BEST'
Updike was acclaimed nearly as much for his short stories, poetry and critical essays as for his 28 novels.
More than 800 Updike stories, reviews, poems and articles were published in The New Yorker magazine from 1954 through 2008. Many American readers strongly associated Updike with that publication.
"Even though his literary career transcended any magazine -- he was obviously among the very best writers in the world -- he still loved writing for this weekly magazine, loved being part of an enterprise that he joined when he was so young," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.
"He was, for so long, the spirit of The New Yorker and it is very hard to imagine things without him."
William Pritchard, a professor of English at Amherst College who studied and knew Updike, said Updike stood out for his versatility -- writing fiction, nonfiction and verse.
"He stands, for me, at the very top of the practice of being a man of letters," Pritchard said. "Each activity was carried on with great intelligence and wit and love."
'MAKE EVERYTHING COUNT'
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike studied English at Harvard University, where he contributed to, and later edited, the satirical Harvard Lampoon magazine. After a year studying at Oxford, Updike moved to New York where he worked for two years on the New Yorker's staff.
In 1957 he moved his family to Ipswich, Massachusetts, a coastal town north of Boston, and later moved to nearby Beverly Farms.
A New England flavor features in Updike's 1984 novel "The Witches of Eastwick," set in a fictional Rhode Island town, which was made into a commercially successful 1987 film starring Jack Nicholson and Cher.
In a Reuters interview in 2005, he said his view of himself as a writer had changed in recent years as he produced an increasing volume of art and literary criticism and struggled with the short-story medium. When asked which genre he preferred, he paused.
"If I had been asked that 10 years ago I would have said short stories is where I feel most at home. I'm not sure I do feel totally at home any more, whether I have maybe written all my short stories," he said.
He was candid about the need to get writing published:
"I've become much more of a book reviewer and an art reviewer for that matter than I ever planned to. At least there is a comfort when you sit down to write one of these that you'll be sure that it will get printed and you'll get paid for it. It's not the case with a short story."
(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols in New York, Editing by Jason Szep and Frances Kerry)
Rabbit is gone: writer John Updike dies
By Scott Malone
Reuters
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
BOSTON (Reuters) - John Updike, a leading writer of his generation who chronicled the drama of small-town American life with flowing and vivid prose, wit and a frank eye for sex, died on Tuesday of lung cancer. He was 76.
"It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning," said Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf, a unit of Random House. "He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed."
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author died in a hospice in Massachusetts, the state where he lived for more than half a century, prolific in his writing of novels, short stories, essays and criticism.
Updike's stories often focused on undercurrents of tension masked by the mundane surface of suburban America, which boomed in 1960s and 1970s as his career was taking off. Ripples of sexual tension were frequent.
An early short story, "A&P," chronicled an adolescent boy's inner turmoil when three bikini-clad teenage girls appeared in the supermarket where he worked.
"It's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach," Updike wrote, "and another thing in the cool of the A&P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor."
Updike's frank focus on sex came before the profound changes in U.S. culture of the late 1960s lifted some of the taboo from the topic. His publisher rewrote portions of his second novel, "Rabbit, Run," before its first printing out of fear of being charged with obscenity.
That novel introduced the fictional hero Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the subject of four Updike novels and a novella over four decades, which won him two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction.
'AMONG THE VERY BEST'
Updike was acclaimed nearly as much for his short stories, poetry and critical essays as for his 28 novels.
More than 800 Updike stories, reviews, poems and articles were published in The New Yorker magazine from 1954 through 2008. Many American readers strongly associated Updike with that publication.
"Even though his literary career transcended any magazine -- he was obviously among the very best writers in the world -- he still loved writing for this weekly magazine, loved being part of an enterprise that he joined when he was so young," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.
"He was, for so long, the spirit of The New Yorker and it is very hard to imagine things without him."
William Pritchard, a professor of English at Amherst College who studied and knew Updike, said Updike stood out for his versatility -- writing fiction, nonfiction and verse.
"He stands, for me, at the very top of the practice of being a man of letters," Pritchard said. "Each activity was carried on with great intelligence and wit and love."
'MAKE EVERYTHING COUNT'
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike studied English at Harvard University, where he contributed to, and later edited, the satirical Harvard Lampoon magazine. After a year studying at Oxford, Updike moved to New York where he worked for two years on the New Yorker's staff.
In 1957 he moved his family to Ipswich, Massachusetts, a coastal town north of Boston, and later moved to nearby Beverly Farms.
A New England flavor features in Updike's 1984 novel "The Witches of Eastwick," set in a fictional Rhode Island town, which was made into a commercially successful 1987 film starring Jack Nicholson and Cher.
In a Reuters interview in 2005, he said his view of himself as a writer had changed in recent years as he produced an increasing volume of art and literary criticism and struggled with the short-story medium. When asked which genre he preferred, he paused.
"If I had been asked that 10 years ago I would have said short stories is where I feel most at home. I'm not sure I do feel totally at home any more, whether I have maybe written all my short stories," he said.
He was candid about the need to get writing published:
"I've become much more of a book reviewer and an art reviewer for that matter than I ever planned to. At least there is a comfort when you sit down to write one of these that you'll be sure that it will get printed and you'll get paid for it. It's not the case with a short story."
(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols in New York, Editing by Jason Szep and Frances Kerry)
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Pulitzer Prizes to allow online-only publications
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=081208234336.pd4okepu
Pulitzer Prizes to allow online-only publications
Dec 8, 2008
The Pulitzer Prizes, the most prestigious US journalism awards, announced Monday they were expanding to include online-only publications.
The Pulitzer Prize Board that oversees the awards said the 2009 prizes, which will be announced in April, had been broadened to include "text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the Internet."
In a statement, the Board said it had "decided to allow entries made up entirely of online content to be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories."
Sig Gissler, administrator of the prizes, said the move was a "logical extension of the historic mission of the Pulitzer Prizes."
"We continue to keep an eye on the changing media scene and try to make appropriate adjustments as we go along," he told AFP.
"There's an evolutionary aspect to the Pulitzer Prizes going back through history," Gissler said. "We added photography in 1943, for example, and we added explanatory journalism, and we started allowing online content as early as 1999."
The Board said that online or print entries should come from US newspapers or news organizations that publish at least weekly and are "primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories."
"Consistent with its historic focus on daily and weekly newspapers, the Board will continue to exclude entries from printed magazines and broadcast media and their respective Web sites," the statement said.
Online content from newspaper websites has been permitted in all journalism categories since 2006 but online-only publications were only allowed to submit entries in two categories -- breaking news and breaking-news photography.
Among the prize categories are local reporting of breaking news, commentary, feature writing, investigative reporting, explanatory reporting and reporting on national or international affairs.
The deadline for entries in the 2009 competition is February 1.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Bob Dylan Wins a Pulitzer Prize
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5idO6antAykNkXQ0nat1qlzqlq1gQD8VTLH1O0
Bob Dylan Wins a Pulitzer Prize
By HILLEL ITALIE
4-8-8
NEW YORK (AP) — Thanks to Bob Dylan, rock 'n' roll has finally broken through the Pulitzer wall. Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."
It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favored classical music, and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive.
"I am in disbelief," Dylan fan and fellow Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz said of Dylan's award.
Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," a tragic but humorous story of desire, politics and violence among Dominicans at home and in the United States, won the fiction prize. Diaz, 39, worked for more than a decade on his first novel — "I spent most of the time on dead-ends and doubts," he told The Associated Press on Monday — and at one point included a section about Dylan.
"Bob Dylan was a problem for me," Diaz, who has also published a story collection, "Drown," said with a laugh. "I had one part that was 40 pages long, the entire chapter was organized around Bob Dylan's lyrics over a two year-period (1967-69). By the end of it, I wanted to throttle my like of Bob Dylan."
The Pulitzer for drama was given to Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County," which, like Diaz's novel, combines comedy and brutality. Letts calls the play "loosely autobiographical," a bruising family battle spanning several generations of unhappiness and unfulfilled dreams.
"It's a play I have been working on in my head and on paper for many years now," said Letts, reached by the AP in Chicago at the Steppenwolf Theater Company, where "August: Osage County" had its world premiere last summer.
"There were just some details from my grandmother, my grandfather's suicide (for example) that I had played over and over in my head for many, many years. I always thought, `Well, that's the stuff of drama right there.'"
Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, already a National Book Award winner for "Time and Materials," won the poetry Pulitzer, as did Philip Schultz's "Failure."
"This is the book ... I have always wanted to write," Schultz told the AP. "Everyone is expert on one subject and failure seems to be mine. ... I was born into it. My father went bankrupt when I was 18 and he died soon afterward out of (a) terrible sense of shame. And we lost everything, my mother and I."
Other winners Monday: Daniel Walker Howe, for history, for "What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848"; Saul Friedlander, general nonfiction, for "The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945"; for biography, John Matteson's "Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father."
"I wrote my book in a way that is generally accessible to the curious literate reader," Howe said. "And I think that's very important, and I wish more books were written that way."
"It's a special honor because it ties me even more to the country of which I'm now a citizen," said Friedlander, who became a U.S. citizen seven years ago and won the German Booksellers Association's 2007 Peace Prize for his work on documenting the Holocaust.
"I am surprised, grateful, overjoyed — and a little embarrassed to do this with my first book," said Matteson, a professor of English at John Jay College in New York City who added that his 14-year-old daughter was an inspiration.
"Not only did I understand parenting better after writing the book, but being a parent helped me to write the book."
Dylan's victory doesn't mean that the Pulitzers have forgotten classical composers. The competitive prize for music was given to David Lang's "The Little Match Girl Passion," which opened last fall at Carnegie Hall, where Dylan has also performed.
"Bob Dylan is the most frequently played artist in my household so the idea that I am honored at the same time as Bob Dylan, that is humbling," Lang told the AP.
Long after most of his contemporaries either died, left the business or held on by the ties of nostalgia, Dylan continues to tour almost continuously and release highly regarded CDs, most recently "Modern Times." Fans, critics and academics have obsessed over his lyrics — even digging through his garbage for clues — since the mid-1960s, when such protest anthems as "Blowin' in the Wind" made Dylan a poet and prophet for a rebellious generation.
His songs include countless biblical references and he has claimed Chekhov, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac as influences. His memoir, "Chronicles, Volume One," received a National Book Critics Circle nomination in 2005 and is widely acknowledged as the rare celebrity book that can be treated as literature.
According to publisher Simon & Schuster, Dylan is working on a second volume of memoirs. No release date has been set.
AP Drama Writer Michael Kuchwara, Music Writer Nekesa Moody, and Associated Press writers Kiley Armstrong, Douglas J. Rowe and Erin Carlson contributed to this report.
Bob Dylan Wins a Pulitzer Prize
By HILLEL ITALIE
4-8-8
NEW YORK (AP) — Thanks to Bob Dylan, rock 'n' roll has finally broken through the Pulitzer wall. Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."
It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favored classical music, and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive.
"I am in disbelief," Dylan fan and fellow Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz said of Dylan's award.
Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," a tragic but humorous story of desire, politics and violence among Dominicans at home and in the United States, won the fiction prize. Diaz, 39, worked for more than a decade on his first novel — "I spent most of the time on dead-ends and doubts," he told The Associated Press on Monday — and at one point included a section about Dylan.
"Bob Dylan was a problem for me," Diaz, who has also published a story collection, "Drown," said with a laugh. "I had one part that was 40 pages long, the entire chapter was organized around Bob Dylan's lyrics over a two year-period (1967-69). By the end of it, I wanted to throttle my like of Bob Dylan."
The Pulitzer for drama was given to Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County," which, like Diaz's novel, combines comedy and brutality. Letts calls the play "loosely autobiographical," a bruising family battle spanning several generations of unhappiness and unfulfilled dreams.
"It's a play I have been working on in my head and on paper for many years now," said Letts, reached by the AP in Chicago at the Steppenwolf Theater Company, where "August: Osage County" had its world premiere last summer.
"There were just some details from my grandmother, my grandfather's suicide (for example) that I had played over and over in my head for many, many years. I always thought, `Well, that's the stuff of drama right there.'"
Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, already a National Book Award winner for "Time and Materials," won the poetry Pulitzer, as did Philip Schultz's "Failure."
"This is the book ... I have always wanted to write," Schultz told the AP. "Everyone is expert on one subject and failure seems to be mine. ... I was born into it. My father went bankrupt when I was 18 and he died soon afterward out of (a) terrible sense of shame. And we lost everything, my mother and I."
Other winners Monday: Daniel Walker Howe, for history, for "What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848"; Saul Friedlander, general nonfiction, for "The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945"; for biography, John Matteson's "Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father."
"I wrote my book in a way that is generally accessible to the curious literate reader," Howe said. "And I think that's very important, and I wish more books were written that way."
"It's a special honor because it ties me even more to the country of which I'm now a citizen," said Friedlander, who became a U.S. citizen seven years ago and won the German Booksellers Association's 2007 Peace Prize for his work on documenting the Holocaust.
"I am surprised, grateful, overjoyed — and a little embarrassed to do this with my first book," said Matteson, a professor of English at John Jay College in New York City who added that his 14-year-old daughter was an inspiration.
"Not only did I understand parenting better after writing the book, but being a parent helped me to write the book."
Dylan's victory doesn't mean that the Pulitzers have forgotten classical composers. The competitive prize for music was given to David Lang's "The Little Match Girl Passion," which opened last fall at Carnegie Hall, where Dylan has also performed.
"Bob Dylan is the most frequently played artist in my household so the idea that I am honored at the same time as Bob Dylan, that is humbling," Lang told the AP.
Long after most of his contemporaries either died, left the business or held on by the ties of nostalgia, Dylan continues to tour almost continuously and release highly regarded CDs, most recently "Modern Times." Fans, critics and academics have obsessed over his lyrics — even digging through his garbage for clues — since the mid-1960s, when such protest anthems as "Blowin' in the Wind" made Dylan a poet and prophet for a rebellious generation.
His songs include countless biblical references and he has claimed Chekhov, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac as influences. His memoir, "Chronicles, Volume One," received a National Book Critics Circle nomination in 2005 and is widely acknowledged as the rare celebrity book that can be treated as literature.
According to publisher Simon & Schuster, Dylan is working on a second volume of memoirs. No release date has been set.
AP Drama Writer Michael Kuchwara, Music Writer Nekesa Moody, and Associated Press writers Kiley Armstrong, Douglas J. Rowe and Erin Carlson contributed to this report.
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