Keeping Literary Company

the long version

Starting in the 1960s, a group of radically new fiction writers began having success at reinventing the novel and short story for postmodern times. These writers found an ally in a young reader named Jerome Klinkowitz. Beginning in 1969 he published the first scholarly essays on Vonnegut, Kosinski, Barthelme, and the others in turn. Keeping Literary Company details Klinkowitz's work with these writers - not just researching their fiction and other publications, but introducing them to one another and taking part in the business-world activities that spread news of their innovations. He shows how what they wrote was so much a part of those turbulent times that a new literary generation found itself defined in such works as Slaughterhouse-Five, Being There, and Snow White. Here is a fascinating first-person account of what these important figures wrote, how they wrote it, and what it means in the development of American fiction.