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Harold Brodkey
(October 25, 1930 - January 26, 1996) USA

Harold Brodkey

Novelist

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Harold Brodkey was born Aaron Roy Weintraub 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. Brodkey would obsessively chronicle the death of his mother and the illnesses of his adoptive parents in his 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.

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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