Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey
Harold Brodkey, by Howard Coale for The New Yorker, 1995
Born	October 25, 1930 (1930-10-25) Staunton, Illinois
Died	January 26, 1996 (1996-01-27) (aged 65) Manhattan, New York City, New York
Other names	Weintraub, Aaron Roy (birth name
Occupation	Writer

Harold Brodkey (October 25, 1930 – January 26, 1996), born Aaron Roy Weintraub, was an American short-story writer and novelist.

Brodkey was born in Staunton, Illinois, to an illiterate junk dealer. His mother died while he was an infant, and he was raised by his father's relatives, who adopted him, in University City, Missouri, outside St. Louis. When he was eight, his adoptive mother developed cancer and his adoptive father had a stroke. The death of his mother and the illnesses of his adoptive parents would be obsessively chronicled again and again in Brodkey's writing. After graduating from Harvard University in 1952, Brodkey began his writing career by contributing short stories to The New Yorker and other magazines. His stories received two first-place O. Henry Awards. In 1993 he announced in The New Yorker that he had contracted AIDS; he later wrote This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (1996), about his battle with the disease. At the time of his death in 1996, he was living in New York City with his wife, novelist Ellen Brodkey (née Schwamm). Brodkey contracted the HIV virus from a homosexual relationship, though he reportedly did not consider himself to be gay.

The author is most famous for taking 32 years to revise and publish his first novel, during which time a sort of legend grew about the much anticipated book. When it was finally published in 1991 as The Runaway Soul, it was not warmly received and caused puzzlement as to whether it was really the same book he had been promising for decades.

Brodkey's career began promisingly with the short-story collection First Love and Other Sorrows, which received widespread critical praise at the time of its 1958 publication.

Six years later he signed a book contract with Random House for his first novel, tentatively titled "A Party of Animals" (it was also referred to as "The Animal Corner"). The unfinished novel was subsequently resold to Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1970, then to Knopf in '79. As a Paris Review interview noted, "The work became something of an object of desire for editors; it was moved among publishing houses for what were rumored to be ever-increasing advances, advertised as a forthcoming title (Party of Animals) in book catalogs, expanded and ceaselessly revised, until its publication seemed an event longer awaited than anything without theological implications." In 1983 the Saturday Review referred to "A Party of Animals" as "now reportedly comprising 4,000 pages and announced as forthcoming 'next year' every year since 1973."