Joyce Carol Oates and Jonathan Safran Foer
For the first and only time in her 32-year teaching career, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a letter to a student’s parents about their son’s prodigious talent for writing. That student was a young undergrad named Jonathan Safran Foer, whose senior thesis, for which Oates served as an adviser, later became his best-selling breakthrough novel Everything Is Illuminated. In a recent interview with New York Magazine, Foer stated that Oates’ investment in his work has spurred him to want to become a writing instructor himself. “I went into her class with no ambition to become a writer, and I left it wanting to be a writer because of the things she showed me,” he remarked. “Ever since, I always thought it would be nice to do that for someone else.”
Comments (15)
Frank Conroy and Tom Grimes
I’m the editor of the acclaimed anthology, Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives (Simon & Schuster 2009). It’s the only collection of essays on writers and their mentors.
Some of the writers writing about their mentors/muses/monsters include Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Smiley, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Cunningham, Mary Gordon, ZZ Packer, Alexander Chee, Edmund White and Dinaw Mengestu. The mentors/muses include Bernard Malamud, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, Virginia Woolf, and Gordon Lish.
See the video & read more: http://www.amazon.com/Mentors-Muses-Monsters-Writers-Changed/dp/1439108617/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295532360&sr=8-1
“Every one of the essays here … is wise and full of heart.” — Chicago Tribune
This is fascinating stuff. Social media is certainly changing the writing landscape and writing mentors.
I think every successful writer is blessed with a great teacher or mentor. I have been with more than a few. Writing my latest, Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, I remembered many who watched over my work, if only in spirit: meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. only several weeks before he was slain; listening to my friend, civil rights attorney Chuck Morgan, under the stars on his pier in northwest Florida; watching Southern Poverty Law Center founder Morris Dees as he argued against segregation in Alabama courts, and riding with my friend Orzell Billingsley Jr. who had to leave Alabama in the late 1950s to go to law school because he could not attend such a school in the state. All had a profound influence on me and my work.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.
A rather sinister one: Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry.
Joyce was never employed at the École Normale Supérieure. Beckett’s dear friend Tom MacGreevey was, and it was MacGreevey who helped get Beckett introduced to Joyce. In the 1930s.
What??? Henry James in the 1880s was “at the tail end of his successful writing career”???
The 1890s would include such novels as The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie Knew, while the turn of the century would include The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. And among stories and novellas, the 1890s would include The Altar of the Dead and The Turn of the Screw while the turn of the century would include my favorite of all James’s works (in fact, my favorite story/novella period), The Beast in the Jungle.
Henry James was not, in the 1880s, “at the tail end of his successful writing career”! Much of his greatest work was yet to come.
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The article mentions the Pound-as-mentor and Eliot-as-protege relationship, but don’t let’s forget Eliot-as-mentor to probably any number of writers through Eliot’s employment at Faber and Faber, which also included his writing of introductions to books by authors as different as, for example, Djuna Barnes and Charles Williams.
Aaaahhhh . . . if only James Joyce could have mentored Isaac Asimov . . . the universe would be a more interesting place!
…Blissful Darkness to the singe of Honest Light. this is just a brief and acute discription of my journey with Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. It was like spending my life walking quitely, befriending everybody, no matter what the situation, afraid to have my own views or opinions, just as long as I was “non-conflicting” and conformed. Deep inside I was afraid to exist…to be, instead of being, I had chosen not to be. Wright and Ellison taught me otherwise. And has started my life on a journey that delightfully frightens me everymorning. I shall now..”Be”.
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