William Eastlake

William Eastlake (1917 in Brooklyn, New York – 1997 [Tucson, Arizona] was an American writer. His Checkerboard Trilogy, consisting of the works Go in Beauty (1956), The Bronc People (1958), and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (1963) was included by literary critic Larry McCaffery in his list of the 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction.

Eastlake was born of British parents in Brooklyn, and grew up in Caldwell, New Jersey. As an infant he and his older brother Gordon were sent to Bonnie Brae, an Episcopal boarding school in nearby Liberty Corners, New Jersey, which he called Prettyfields, which he features in his 1969 novel The Bamboo Bed.

In the early 1940s, he worked at the Stanley Rose Bookstore in Los Angeles, California, which was a literary hangout for writers Nathanael West, Clifford Odets, Theodore Dreiser, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck et al. He also worked as a reporter, covering the story of a lynching in Mississippi, where he visited writer William Faulkner. In 1943 he married painter Martha Simpson (1898-1984).

In 1942, Eastlake joined the U.S. Army, and was stationed at Camp MacArthur and Camp Ord in California, followed by Camp White in Oregon. After the Pearl Harbor Attack, all Japanese draftees in the U.S. Army were sent to Camp Ord, where Eastlake was given the job of "looking after them", writing "I never knew a more pro-American, patriotic group than those Japanese-American soldiers." Eastlake would obligingly take photographs of them to send to their relatives "in the euphemistic 'relocation' camps." Eventually the troops were placed into a separate combat unit and sent off to war. "They fought and died with the best of them while their parents languished in concentration camps," Eastlake wrote. His frustration and anger over this experience are portrayed in his first novel Ishimoto's Land, which remains unpublished. "The publishers told me it was too early for a book about this American tragedy. The public is not ready for it yet."

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