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In Print Better Late When Three Junes appeared last spring, writer Julia Glass '78 had modest hopes for her first novel (see "In Print," May 2002). "I certainly never imagined being shortlisted for the National Book Award," says Glass, whose debut effort nevertheless wound up a fiction-category finalist for one of the most prestigious honors in American letters. The writer had plenty of Yale alumni company at the awards ceremony in November. Also nominated for fiction were Law School student Adam Haslett for You Are Not a Stranger Here and Mark Costello '88JD for Big If; in non-fiction, Steve Olson '78 was nominated for Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes. However, only Glass walked away with a National Book Award -- a real coup for a first-time novelist -- and with it, the writer says she's gone "from 0 to 100." Glass's success could hardly have been forecast from her curriculum at Yale, where she took only two English courses and wrote no fiction. (She still regrets never taking "Daily Themes.") "I didn't come to write fiction through the usual channels," says Glass, who was a Scholar of the House -- in art -- "but I'm not an outsider." At Concord Academy, she wrote fiction and worked for the literary magazine. Glass didn't pursue writing at Yale because, she says, "I didn't think you could grow up to be a writer." After graduation, she painted in Paris on a fellowship and then worked at Harvard on the Sardis Expedition. In 1980, she moved to New York and started to support herself by doing freelance copy-editing and proofreading for several book publishers. (She still edits copy for J.P. Morgan Chase as a freelancer.) Glass's compulsion for writing fiction had returned when she was in Paris. "I read all of E.M. Forster, and tons of George Eliot," she says. After her short story, "Husbandry," was published in 1996, a friend said to her, "You know what? Just write a novel." Glass took her story, "Souvenirs," and turned it into another named "Collies," which became the first part of Three Junes. The novel takes place in Scotland, Greece, and New York, and she calls it a product of "diligent research." While the book enjoyed critical acclaim and moderate sales success, Glass was a realist when it came to assessing her chances for the National Book Award. She didn't expect to win but, novelist that she is, she can recite all the details of the gala dinner, including eating a gummy biscuit right before the fiction award was presented. She remembers thinking, "Thank God I don't have to get up on that stage!" Then the announcer said that the award was going to a "symphonic" work (which Pantheon has been calling her book). "I thought that I had three seconds to 1) get myself together, 2) get the gummy stuff out of my teeth, and 3) find in my purse my list of people I needed to thank." Glass used to ask herself,
"Who do you think you are having a first book in your mid-forties?'"
In her thirties, when she was watching her friends having children
and seeing their careers taking off, she says she "felt stalled."
Now, she sees things differently and tells people it's all right
to get around to doing what they want to do later than they thought
they would. She notes, "I couldn't have written this book ten years
earlier."
Richard M. Ketchum
'43 Surrounded by water, New York City was easy prey for the British navy, which occupied the town during most of the Revolutionary War. Yet there was more than geography at play, as Richard Ketchum demonstrates. Since its early Dutch-English disputes, and later during War riots, the city typified diversity and discord. New York mobs, spurred on by the roughneck Sons of Liberty, helped win repeal of the hated Stamp Tax in 1766. Successes like this affirmed the American self-confidence that had been building since Walpole's "benign neglect" of the colonies in the early 18th century and the victorious French and Indian War. Other New York residents considered themselves British subjects and at most took exception with Parliament, not their king. A veteran writer on the Revolution, Ketchum affectionately portrays a city and many of its residents. William Livingston, a major figure in this account, starts out as part of a well-born but anti-British trio whose members were, a contemporary complained, "educated at Yale College, at New Haven in Connecticut; then, and still, a nursery of sedition, of faction, and republicanism." The Loyalist side too had a prominent Yale graduate in Samuel Seabury, Class of 1749. Seabury, who became the first U.S. Episcopal bishop in 1785, had earlier circulated anonymous tracts condemning the revolutionary movement. In fact, as a result of his Loyalist sympathies, he'd been forced to flee to British-held New York -- one step ahead of a lynch mob. "By now it was apparent,"
Ketchum writes of the city in 1775, "that these outdoor gatherings,
to which the public was invited and which attracted large crowds,
almost always enthusiastically endorsed the republican position.
Indoors, however, in the Assembly and the Council meetings, the
conservatives won almost all the votes . . Yet although they prevailed
on every issue, it was as if a door were slowly closing on the [Loyalists],
shutting them into a chamber from which there was no escape, while
outside a whirlwind was gathering that would sweep away their familiar
world, transforming it into a land that would be forever alien to
them."
Marie Borroff '56PHD,
Sterling Professor Emerita of English For over 50 years, Marie Borroff '56PhD, Sterling Professor Emerita of English at Yale, has been known to many as a distinguished scholar and as a translator of verse. While her original poems have appeared in the New Republic, the American Scholar, and other publications, her collected poems are only now appearing in book form. In a note to Stars and Other Signs, Borroff explains that throughout her career in academia, "the writing of poems was an essential part of life." With an intricacy of sense and sound, the poems explore youth and aging, birth and death, and love and loss. These human experiences achieve a real intimacy as they come to life against detailed landscapes, such as an island beach, a college campus, and a wintry road. In "Walking: A Psalm," the speaker and the world are spiritually united. Borroff writes, the grit in the street "is bread; my sole / Breaks it, and I am whole." Borroff breathes divine
life into everyday occurrences. In "Origination," the hermit thrush
"sets one clear phrase afloat / as if no living throat / had ever
shaped a note," and in "In Memoriam J.B.G.," the poet remembers
a departed friend's "once and only face." The poems, overall, carry
a message: Love this world before you must leave it. As Borroff
reminds us, "time's branches hold us fast / only to cast us free."
Bruce Feiler '87 In the world, there are about 12 million Jews, 1 billion Muslims, and 2 billion Christians. But while these major religions have long had trouble getting along, they all trace their lineage back to the same man: Abraham. "The great patriarch of the Hebrew Bible is also the spiritual forefather of the New Testament and the grand holy architect of the Koran," writes Bruce Feiler in an engaging and provocative examination of "history's first monotheist." However, despite Abraham's central role in these faiths, he remains, says the author, "largely unknown." To understand the patriarch's legacy and continuing appeal, Feiler recounts a personal quest "through place and time -- three religions, four millennia, one never-ending war" -- that starts and ends in Jerusalem. "I wanted to figure out whether [Abraham] was a hopeless fount of war or a possible vessel for reconciliation," he writes. Using the same strategy employed in Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses (see May 2001), Feiler visits the places that have come to be identified with Abraham. But because this is not a journey in search of history -- in fact, Abraham may be more metaphor than reality -- the author concentrates on talking to people whose lives have been influenced by the father of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The search takes the author to synagogues, mosques, and churches; to rabbis, imams, and priests; to scholars of religion, archeologists, and ordinary citizens of the Holy Land. And Feiler quickly discovers not one Abraham, but many -- a man continually reinterpreted to fit the needs of the religions that have used him as a centerpiece. He also finds that in the course of being reshaped, Abraham "moved from being considered a universal figure open to all religions to being considered a more exclusive figure who favors one faith." The result of claiming the Abrahamic truth as the domain of a single religion alone has, of course, led to countless tragedies, and in Jerusalem and the surrounding landscape -- to say nothing of New York City on September 11 -- these continue on a daily basis. "Abraham clearly provided a road map of what had gone wrong among the religions. Could he also provide a road map for how to make it right?" the author wonders. In the most unlikely
of sources, Feiler finds a reason to be hopeful. During a tense
interview with firebrand Muslim cleric Sheikh Abu Sneina, the imam
noted that "Abraham can be a uniting figure." True, the patriarch's
followers adhered to different texts, but, said Sneina, "if we look
beyond the details, which we may disagree about, and follow the
principles of Abraham -- truth, morality, and coexistence -- then
most of our problems will disappear."
Deb Abramson '91 Alex Epstein '93 Eileen
Pollack '78 Samantha Power '92 Martha Sandweiss
'85PhD Ray
Sipherd '57
Deb Abramson 1991 Jack M. Balkin 1994MAH
David Boonin 1986 Marie Borroff 1956PhD,
Sterling Professor Emeritus
of English Barnaby Conrad 1944
and Monte Schulz, Editors Alex Epstein 1985 Bruce Feiler 1987
Paul Foos 1997PhD Lorraine Gorrell
1966MM, 1967MA Richard Jensen 1966PhD
and J. Douglas Smith Richard M. Ketchum
1943 Karl Kirchwey 1979 Katherine A. Lawrence
1990 and Jeff DeGraff Elise Lemire 1986 Ellen Peel 1982PhD Samantha Power 1992 Stephen G. Ray Jr.
1993MDiv Lori Rotskoff 1999PhD Lawrence Schimel
1993, Editor Bruce Shenitz 1976,
1994MSL and Andrew Holleran, Editors Harvey B. Simon
1963 Ray Sipherd 1957 John F. Stacks 1964
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
1962JD Khristaan Villela
1990, Logan Wagner, and Ellen Bradbury Loren Wengerd 2001,
Laura K. Hurwitz, and Amanda Lumry, Photographers Gary Jay Williams
1974PhD |
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Yale
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