Was Heller & V. thread

[Mark Kohut]

Later in Heller's life, later 80s, when Candida was having some life and professional problems and Heller 
was one of them, the biographer reminds us that Candida would never say anything about any writers she 'lost',
Pynchon cited most famously. 

From: Jeff Sunbury <jsunbury at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> 
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2013 11:38 PM
Subject: Re: Was Heller & V. thread



This is probably old news for P-listers from the NYTimes (1998): 


120 letters that Mr. Pynchon sent to his agent, Candida Donadio, from 1963 to 1982. In 1984, Carter Burden, the businessman, politician and arts patron, purchased the group of letters from Ms. Donadio (through a dealer, Ralph Sipper, of Joseph the Provider Books in Santa Barbara, Calif.) for $45,000, making it the most expensive item in Mr. Burden's valuable American literature collection.




On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 11:03 PM, Jeff Sunbury <jsunbury at gmail.com> wrote:

from Unscrewing the navel allusion: 
> "Fast Learner: The Typescript of Pynchon's V. at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin," by Luc Herman and John Krafft describes how Cork Smith, after "Low-lands" was published by New World/Lippincott in March 1960, agreed to contract Pynchon for an as yet unwritten novel (V.) and backdated the contract to Jan. 1960. While Candida and her cockatoo lurked in the shadows in a haze of cigarette smoke.
>
>
>
>On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 9:51 PM, Jeff Sunbury <jsunbury at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>Correction: When "Catch-18" was published New World Writing owned by New American Library's Mentor imprint (1951-1960), 
>>
>>
>>
>>On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 9:40 PM, Jeff Sunbury <jsunbury at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>New World Writing is one connecting link btwn. Heller and Pynchon. It was owned by Lippincott. The initial chapter  oof Catch-22 was published in 1955 as "Catch-18", in Issue 7 of New World Writing. Heller's agent was "the famous Candida Donadio". Pynchon's short story "Low-lands" was first published in Issue 16 of New World Writing in March 1960. And Lippincott is where Corlies Smith and Faith Sale worked and co-edited V. When sorting out the mind-set of writers/novelists during the pre-Kennedy Assassination years, I would add Robert Stone who wrote a defining memoir/autobiography titled Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2007). Stone was born in Brooklyn the same year as Pynchon, dropped out of high school, did a 4-year stint in the Navy (1954-8), did some hack writing in New York and New Orleans, ending up at Stanford where he rubbed elbows with Ken Kesey. He was literally and figuratively "on the bus (Furthur)" with Kesey and Neal Cassady
 and other ne'er-do-wells. Prime Green refers to a beach in Mexico which may be a bit like Paradise. The memoir and the generation climaxes in 1969, the year of Neil Armstrong and Charles Manson before Stone went to Vietnam as a correspondent..
>>>
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>>>On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 8:21 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>Heller remarked latet in his career that at the time he was writing Catch--22, Kesey was writing 
>>>>Cuckoo's Nest, Pynchon was writing V. , Donleavy, The Ginger Man and Vonnegut Catch--22.
>>>>He knew of the work of none of the others; he had never heard that any of them knew of each other then. 
>>>>
>>>>It was the sensibility turn somehow, he implies. 
>>>>The biography author quotes Bruce Jay Friedman about this time. "In college, all the courses I took were
>>>>about what's wrong." Associatively implying that their work tackled that. 
>>>
>>
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