Famous Authors And Their Typewriters

There's a nostalgia out there for typewriters; this may be overselling the point a bit but there's a nostalgia for famous writers and their typewriters as well:

There’s something magical about catching a glimpse of one of your favorite authors at work – even a photo of the epic event can send an anxious thrill down your spine, as if you might be able to see some hint of literary genius in posture or setting, in attire or facial expression. And it’s even better if they’re working on a typewriter. After all, there’s something impossibly gorgeous about a typewriter – maybe it’s the vintage charm, maybe it’s the physicality the noisy machine lends to the writing process, but people. . . go mad for typewriters. . .

I think the writer of this piece misses the point about typewriters. It's likely she learned her craft clicking away at a computer keyboard and has little experience with typewriters.

Sure, nostalgia for typewriters is fun but writers used these instruments as tools of their trade. Bottom line: a typewriter helped the writing process and made getting the prose down on paper easier. Using a pad and pencil or pen was inferior though many may have continued to use that - Hemingway recommended first drafts in long-hand - you had one more chance to sharpen your prose and no one knew more about sharp prose than Hemingway- and Martha Grimes still writes in long-hand though you can be sure the manuscript she turns in to her publisher has been run through a word-processing program. Which is to say if a writer is still writing his drafts by hand, he's being self-indulgent. But when it comes time to cranking out clean, readable copy for editors or readers or other users of the piece of writing, typewriters were far superior than old-fashioned handwriting. I imagine these writers at the linked article would gladly trade their Remingtons and Olivettis and IBM Selectrics for a laptop and a Word program.

No, I'm not immune to romance. This is what I imagined I'd be doing when I graduated from college with a degree in journalism:


The truth is, crafting prose is hard work and you're lucky if you can make a living doing it. A professional finds, and uses, the best tools of the trade to help him along.

Sorry Charley - The Truth Behind Steinbeck's Travels With Charley

It's been a few years since I've read the book but count me among the fans of John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley. Here was the soon-to-be Nobel prize winner laying it on the line and hitting the road to report about the current state of America. But how true was the book?

Turns out, not very:

A huge commercial success from the day it hit bookstands, Travels With Charley in Search of America was touted and marketed as the true account of Steinbeck’s solo journey. It stayed on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for a year, and its commercial and cultural tail—like those of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath—has been long and fat. For five decades Steinbeck scholars and others who should know better have not questioned the book’s honesty. But I had come to realize that the iconic American road book was not only heavily fictionalized; it was something of a fraud.

I'd say "fraud" is too harsh a word but when you're dealing with writers who make up stuff for a living, you have to expect that the work they insist is true may not be entirely so.

I'm not disappointed to learn this. I didn't expect the book to be straight journalism - no one reading it can come away quite believing everything Steinbeck has to say. Bill Steigerwald in the above linked article as well as his blog entries has done a fine piece of literary excavation and found a truer version of Steinbeck's story. And he also found there are plenty of people out there who, well, can't handle the truth. Steinbeck might've found that amusing and worth writing about, too.

I think Steigerwald's work sheds a different light on Steinbeck's book but says more about Steinbeck's supporters and promoters than the man himself.

Cheap Books

Speaking of cheap books - and I was - the price point of e-books may be as low as 99 cents:

Joe Konrath has an interesting interview with independent writer John Locke who currently holds the coveted #1 spot in the Amazon Top 100 and has sold just over 350,000 downloads on Kindle of his 99 cent books since January 1st of this year, which, with a royalty rate of 35%, is an annual income well over $500k. Locke says that 99 cents is the magic number and adds that when he lowered the price of his book The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, he started selling 20 times as many copies — about 800 a day, turning his loss lead into his biggest earner.

I think that's about right. I know for iTunes, I don't mind taking a chance and dropping a buck on a tune. If I don't like it, I'm only out a buck; if I do like it, well, the pleasure of the 3 or 4 minute ditty is endless.

Writing a book takes a lot of time and effort and talent but no more so than producing a piece of music. Sure, the pleasures of a good book may last longer but that's only because it takes a longer time to consume. You'd think, then, you'd be willing to pay out more for a book than for a song but that's not how the market works. You pay what for perceived value.

In this case, Konrath has found no one's interested in taking a risk on his book for $2.99. For a dollar, they're willing to take that risk. I'd take that risk, too, if I used an e-reader. Once Konrath has his reader hooked at this price, he still has the writer's responsibility to be interesting. If he is, then he's got a customer for his next book. If not, well, he still earned a buck. In the writing world, that's not bad.

The Art of Manliness

I don't have a man cave but from the looks of some of these, I gotta get me one:

In reading about the lives of history’s great men, one thing I’ve noticed is that many of them had a place they could go to be alone with their thoughts. Some of these men had a study where they would retreat to think, read, and write. Others had a garage or workshop where they would tinker and experiment. But what all these rooms had in common was their sheer manliness. They were man spaces, places a man could call his own.

Here's Hemingway's writing space in Key West:


Of course, this is the restored, touristy version; whoever decorated it made sure the Hemingway icons were present: art, fishing, hunting. The reality was likely quite a bit different but isn't it lovely to think this was how things were?

A man could get quite a lot of writing in a space like this. Or if he didn't, he had no good excuse.

Faulkner's Too Busy For Messages

Via Althouse, William Faulkner on "messages" in literature:

That he is too busy dealing with people to have time to deliver messages to anyone. The messages happen just by chance. That he is interested in—in creating flesh and blood people to do the—the tragic or the comic things which people do for—for pleasure. That is, I think that one should read for pleasure, that one doesn't necessarily have to read for pleasure, but I myself read for pleasure, not for ideas. That if it's—I've got to hunt around in a book to—looking for an idea, then I'd rather do something else. I'd rather do something that's more fun than that. It won't be reading.

Imagine that. A Nobel-prize winning writer reads for pleasure, not for ideas. Tell that to your English professor next time he demands you write a paper on the symbology of a particular work.

(See also this post about Billy Collins and poetry.)

Hey, it was Jack Kerouac's birthday yesterday. That doesn't mean anything to you because you're not a hipster but at one time I was a huge fan of his. I'd first read about Kerouac in Pete Hamill's now much-maligned liner notes to Bob Dylan's mighty Blood on the Tracks:

And it made me think of Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti, and most of all, Kerouac, racing Dean Moriarty across the country in the Fifties, embracing wind and night, passing Huck Finn on the riverbanks, bouncing against the Coast, and heading back again, with Kerouac dreaming his songs of the railroad earth.

I was in high school then and came across an essay of Kerouac's in our literature book about his job as a fire watchman in the mountains of California. His vivid prose hooked me and I was off, gulping down On The Road, of course, and then anything else I could get my hands on - Dr. Sax and Maggie Cassady stayed with me but his other published works gradually faded - even The Town and The City, his first, more conventional novel.

My infatuation continued in college - I attended a talk that Allen Ginsberg gave in the English department and the instructors were swooning - but it gradually passed marriage and maturity. I later tried to pick up and re-read something of his and remember thinking, man, these guys just need to settle down and get a job. The magic had vanished. Ah, youth.

So maybe Kerouac is really a young person's writer but I remember how his vision moved me and those he still moves are lucky. Enjoy him while you can, I say. And I'm glad to see in the link above that it's the conservative movie site, Big Hollywood, that remembers his birthday and points out, despite his flaws, that Kerouac was a conservative Catholic and celebrated freedom. If any of the liberal sites out there marked the occasion, I've yet to see it.

Update: Roger Ebert posted something. Odd how two movie-related sites are the ones to take note.

‘Spenser’ Novelist Robert Parker Dies

Writers are dropping like flies. First it was Erich Segal, now it's Robert Parker:

Robert Parker, the author of the popular "Spenser" novels about a hard-nosed Boston private investigator, has died. He was 77.

A spokeswoman for the Cambridge police department says an ambulance was sent to Parker's home at about 11 a.m. Monday for reports of a sudden death. The spokeswoman, Alexa Manocchio, says the death was of "natural causes" and is not considered suspicious.

A publicist for Parker's publisher confirmed the death but had no further details.

Here's more about Parker:

In the past quarter century, it could be said, no writer of private-eye fiction was more popular or prolific than Robert B. Parker, who died Monday at the age of 77. His nearly 40 books involving the no-first-name Boston P.I. Spenser—starting in 1973 with "The Godwulf Manuscript" and ending, it would seem, with "The Professional," published three months ago—made the Massachusetts-born Mr. Parker a best-selling author and a household-name in all homes where mystery fiction was consumed.

Building on aspects developed by illustrious predecessors (aspects he studied as the author of a doctoral dissertation on the private eye in American fiction)—the bantering dialogue of Raymond Chandler, the concern for young people expressed by Ross Macdonald, the swift action of Dashiell Hammett, even the violence of Mickey Spillane—Mr. Parker created a hero and a series of books that revivified the P.I. genre, making it fresh and viable through the end of the 20th century and into the next.

I've read a few of the Spenser books and a couple of the Jessie Stone books. I never followed the Spenser TV series but I caught the Stone TV movies with Tom Selleck and they're a good fit for him.

Huh. I see I was a bit harsh on the movie Appaloosa that was based on Parker's book - and I may have been harsher on Parker in that review than I feel about him now that he's died. If you were wanting to start in on a series character by a solid writer, you could do worse than Parker. As for me, he just might be worth a second look.

(And for writers, I like this from Parker in the above linked article:

But Mr. Parker—whose oeuvre also included series with a small-town sheriff, Jesse Stone, and a woman P.I. named Sunny Randall, as well as a handful of westerns and other novels—of course had a very real job, working five days a week turning out five pages a day. "It's like running a small business," he told fellow writer Stuart Kaminsky, adding: "'Writer's block? That's just another word for 'lazy.'"

Okay, definitely worth a second look.)