David Shetzline

David W. Shetzline (born 1936, Yonkers, New York) is an American author residing in Oakridge, Oregon.

Shetzline received his bachelor of arts from Cornell University in 1956 and his masters in literature from the University of Oregon in 1997. His dissertation was entitled “Quantum Dialogues: The Rhetorics of Religion and the Metaphors of Postmodern Science (English, 2000). He served as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army, in addition to being a ditchdigger and a student at Columbia University. He wrote in “the Cornell school” of writing in the 1960s with Thomas Pynchon and Richard Fariña. This school of writing has been defined through as having three preoccupations (1) socio-political paranoia, (2) concern with environmental degradation, and (3) awareness of popular culture’s unique impact on the American mind. In addition to Pynchon and Fariña, the Cornell School would also include Mary F. Beal, to whom Shetzline was married. The Cornell School could also be said to include, or be influenced by, Vladimir Nabokov and Kurt Vonnegut. It stands in contrast to older literary traditions of that university, such as the literary traditions represented by E.B. White and Hiram Corson.

In 1968, Shetzline signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

His first work, DeFord, was published in 1968.DeFord is dedicated to the memory of Fariña. Reviewing DeFord, author Thomas Pynchon wrote, "What makes Shetzline's voice a truly original and important one is the way he uses these interference-patterns to build his novel, combining an amazing talent for seeing and listening with a yarn-spinner's native gift for picking you up, keeping you in the spell of the action, the chase, not letting go of you till you've said, yes, I see; yes, this is how it is."DeFord was a seminal contra use of geography as a metaphor.

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