Stanley Elkin

Writer and educator

• Born: May 11, 1930
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: May 31, 1995
• Place of death: St. Louis, Missouri

Elkin wrote in many genres, from novels to literary criticism and cultural commentary, and he is noted for his painstaking care with style and language.

Early Life

Stanley Elkin (EHL-kehn) was born in were chosen but lived most of his youth in the Chicago area. His father was a traveling salesman, and his gift for rhetoric, which he used in making his sales pitches, greatly impressed his son, who remembered his father as a great storyteller. Some critics believe that Elkin’s high regard for his father and for his father’s business acumen is reflected in some of the characters in his fiction. During his youth, Elkin’s family spent much of each summer at a resort community in New Jersey, where many Jewish families came to get away from the urban environments of New York City and of cities in New Jersey. This environment is reflected in Elkin’s novel The Rabbi of Lud, published in 1987. Elkin had his Bar Mitzvah in New York City in July, 1943, during one of these sojourns in the East. His parents belonged to a synagogue in south Chicago but did not attend regularly, and Elkin was not an observant Jew.

Elkin attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Illinois, where he first studied journalism and planned to major in that field. However, on the advice of one of his composition instructors, he decided to major in English. While in college, he wrote for the Illini Writer, the university’s undergraduate literary journal. His first published story, “The Dying,” appeared in that journal in September, 1950. He received his bachelor’s degree from Illinois in 1952 and a master’s degree the following year. He continued on toward the doctorate, but his graduate work was disrupted by service in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957. While in graduate school, he worked as a manuscript reader for Accent magazine, which also published some of his early stories. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1961. His doctoral dissertation was entitled “Religious Themes and Symbolism in the Novels of William Faulkner.” While completing his doctorate, he was hired to teach at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Except for brief leaves of absence and stints as a visiting professor at other institutions, he spent his entire career at Washington University.

Life’s Work

After finishing his doctorate, Elkin found that the teaching load as a full-time professor left him little time for pursuing his own writing career. His mother offered to match his university salary for a year and to provide traveling expenses. This allowed Elkin to take a leave of absence and to spend a year in Rome and London, during which he finished his first novel, Boswell: A Modern Comedy, which was published in 1964. The book received a prize for humor from the influential Paris Review but met with mixed reviews from critics. Over the course of his career, Elkin published ten novels, numerous short stories, two collections of novellas, and many essays of literary criticism and cultural commentary. He was made a full professor at Washington University in 1969. He frequently taught at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Elkin noted that the writers who influenced him included Henry James, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner. He also recalled benefiting greatly from taking a course from the poet Randall Jarrell, who taught one year at Illinois during Elkin’s undergraduate days. Among his contemporaries, he suggested he was most influenced by Saul Bellow and William Gass, who became his personal friends; Gass was also a colleague at Washington University. Elkin suffered a heart attack in 1968 and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1972. While the muscle-wasting disease took a heavy toll and he was increasingly disabled, he continued to teach, even after being confined to a wheelchair shortly before his death. Mortality was always a significant theme in his writing but took on greater significance in his later writing. In his novel The Franchiser, published in 1976, the main character suffers from multiple sclerosis, and Elkin used the disease as a metaphor to describe the crumbling state of America’s economy and energy policies.

Elkin has been called a “black humorist,” a satirist, a Jewish ethnic writer, and a modern realist. He generally rejected all attempts at labeling him, although he did admit his early writings were in the realist school. Elkin once told an interviewer that he resented being labeled a “Jewish writer,” but, at the same time, he was offended when he was left out of anthologies of Jewish fiction (as he generally was). The esteem with which Elkin was regarded by his fellow writers is reflected in the numerous interviews with him that were published in literary journals and book-length collections and the number of his stories that are anthologized in fiction collections. “The Bailbondsman,” a novella published in Elkin’s collection Searches and Seizures in 1973, was made into a movie entitled Alex and the Gypsy (1976), starring Jack Lemmon. In 1983, Elkin became the Merle King Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University. This endowed professorship released him from much routine teaching and allowed him to focus more time on his writing. Four of his books were nominated for National Book Awards. His novel George Mills, published in 1982, and the posthumously published Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995) both received National Book Critics Circle Awards. Four years after Elkin’s death from heart failure, Washington University established an endowed professorship in Elkin’s honor.

Significance

Elkin was often called an“academic writer,” not only because he was a university professor of writing and a novelist but also because the fiction and nonfiction essays he wrote were appreciated primarily by other writers and those who taught writing and American literature. While his works were widely taught in colleges and universities, and often anthologized in classroom readers, commercial success among the general public eluded him. His novels achieved generally positive critical acclaim, especially for his careful attention to language and rhetoric. As a professor of writing at Washington University for more than thirty years and at numerous writers’ conferences and as a visiting professor at other institutions, he had a wide-ranging impact on many later writers.

Bibliography

Bailey, Peter Joseph. Reading Stanley Elkin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Bailey wrote a doctoral dissertation on Elkin’s fiction, focusing on his use of pattern and perception; this work enlarges and updates that study.

Dougherty, David C. Shouting Down the Silence: A Biography of Stanley Elkin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. A full-length biography of Elkin, by a scholar who knew him personally and has researched the author for more than two decades.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Stanley Elkin. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Primarily a survey of the literary criticism of Elkin’s writings, the book also includes a biographical sketch of Elkin.

Elkin, Stanley. Early Elkin. Flint, Mich.: Baumberger Books, 1982. A collection of several of Elkin’s early stories and a brief “reading memoir” about what he read as a young man; includes some autobiographical details.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Pieces of Soap. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. An eclectic collection of thirty essays on a variety of topics, with some autobiographical content.

Vendler, Helen. “Stanley Elkin Revisited: Reflections and Reminiscences.” New England Review 27, no. 4 (Fall, 2006): 57-59. Vendler, an American poetry critic and professor at Harvard University, shares recollections of her friendship with Elkin.