Connell, Evan S., Jr. 1924–

(Evan Shelby Connell, Jr.)

PERSONAL: Born August 17, 1924, in Kansas City, MO; son of Evan Shelby (a surgeon) and Elton (Williamson) Connell. Education: Attended Dartmouth College, 1941–43; University of Kansas, A.B., 1947; graduate study at Stanford University, 1947–48, Columbia University, 1948–49, and San Francisco State College (now University).

ADDRESSES: Home—Fort Marcy 13, 320 Artist Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501. Agent—Don Congdon, 156 5th Ave., Ste. 625, New York, NY 10010-7002.

CAREER: Poet, editor, novelist, and short story writer. Military service: U.S. Navy, pilot and flight instructor, 1943–45.

AWARDS, HONORS: Eugene F. Saxton fellow, 1953; Guggenheim fellow, 1963; Rockefeller Foundation grant, 1967; California Literature silver medal, 1974, for The Connoisseur; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, general nonfiction category, 1984, and Los Angeles Times Book Award, 1985, both for Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award, 1987; Lifetime Achievement Award, Lannan Foundation, 2000.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

The Anatomy Lesson, and Other Stories, Viking (New York, NY), 1957.

Mrs. Bridge, Viking (New York, NY), 1959.

The Patriot, Viking (New York, NY), 1960.

At the Crossroads: Stories, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1965.

The Diary of a Rapist, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1966.

Mr. Bridge, Knopf (New York, NY), 1969.

The Connoisseur, Knopf (New York, NY), 1974.

Double Honeymoon, Putnam (New York, NY), 1976.

St. Augustine's Pigeon (short stories), North Point Press (Berkeley, CA), 1980.

The Alchymist's Journal, North Point Press (Berkeley, CA), 1991.

The Collected Stories of Evan S. Connell, Counterpoint (New York, NY), 1995.

Deus Lo Volt! Chronicle of the Crusades, Counterpoint (New York, NY), 2000.

OTHER

(Editor) Jerry Stoll, I Am a Lover, Angel Island Publications (Sausalito, CA), 1961.

Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (epic poem), Viking (New York, NY), 1963.

(Editor) Woman by Three, Pacific Coast Publishers (Menlo Park, CA), 1969.

Points for a Compass Rose (epic poem), Knopf (New York, NY), 1973.

A Long Desire (nonfiction), Holt (New York, NY), 1979.

The White Lantern (nonfiction), Holt (New York, NY), 1980.

Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn (nonfiction), North Point Press (Berkeley, CA), 1984.

Mesa Verde (nonfiction), Whitney Museum (New York, NY), 1992.

The Aztec Treasure House: New and Selected Essays (includes essays from A Long Desire and The White Lantern), Counterpoint (New York, NY), 2001.

Francisco Goya: A Life Counterpoint (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor of short stories and reviews to periodicals, including New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, New York, San Francisco Chronicle, Carolina Quarterly, Paris Review, and Esquire. Editor of Contact (literary magazine), 1959–65.

ADAPTATIONS: The novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge were adapted as the film Mr. and Mrs. Bridge by Merchant-Ivory Productions in 1990, starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn was adapted for television by Republic Pictures in 1991.

SIDELIGHTS: The works of Evan S. Connell, Jr., range widely in scope and theme, from domestic dramas of the modern middle class to fictitious historical treatises on the Crusades and alchemy. While his fiction has been widely reviewed, and adapted to film, it was his nonfiction work, Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn, that placed him on the bestseller lists. According to William H. Nolte in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Connell "would probably rank today as the most important American novelist if critical reception were the sole criterion for determining the reputation of a writer." Brooks Landon, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1981, explained that "Connell's works have been successful with critics and have enjoyed respectable sales, but his impressive writing still remains one of America's best-kept literary secrets." A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that, while Connell "never developed a clear literary profile," he is nonetheless "a consummate craftsman who has enjoyed some remarkable successes."

The critical acclaim for Connell's work began with his first collection, The Anatomy Lesson, and Other Stories. At the time of the book's publication in 1957, Anne Chamberlain of the New York Herald Tribune wrote: "With a virtuoso's dexterity [Connell] explores theme and treatment, subject matter and attack, darting from the precious and the esoteric to almost legendary folk tales, laid in his native Midwest and in distant corners of America. This is a many-faceted writer." New York Times reviewer Siegfried Mandel called him "a craftsman who can evoke, sustain and dignify the 'small' tragedy that is often hidden from view." And William Hogan, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, said that the stories in The Anatomy Lesson are "well-observed, well-worked slices of life that exhibit craftsmanship, discipline and maturity. Connell is obviously a serious writer of promise and I look forward with great expectations to the publication of his first novel."

That first novel, Mrs. Bridge, is probably Connell's best-known work, as well as the one to which his subsequent books are most often compared. In it the author tells the story of India Bridge, an upper-class Midwestern woman, wife of a lawyer, mother of three children, who comes to personify Connell's concept of the idle rich. She is easily confused; she is bored with her leisure-class existence; and she is dominated by materialism and the need to be "socially correct." India Bridge, according to some critics, may be the most fully developed character in any post-World War II American novel. In her New York Herald Tribune review, Chamberlain said that Connell had achieved "a triumph of ironic characterization. In his heroine, who appears at first meeting the acme of mediocrity, he manages to create an interesting, a pathetically comic, a tragically lonely figure…. It is sad, somewhat terrifying to reflect upon the numberless Mrs. Bridges trotting befuddledly through this urgent age."

In the decade following the publication of Mrs. Bridge, Connell published two more novels, The Patriot and The Diary of a Rapist, one book-length poem, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel, and a collection of short stories, At the Crossroads: Stories. Most of these were accepted by reviewers. He then returned to the Bridge family for his fourth novel, Mr. Bridge, which tells the Bridges' story from the husband's point of view. A Playboy critic called the book "a brilliant dissection of the quintessential small-town WASP—performed under the light of high art, with irony, insight, and a bleak pity." Webster Schott wrote in the Washington Post Book World: "Had Sinclair Lewis possessed compassion equal to his anger, discipline to complement his energy, he might have written Mr. Bridge. Evan Connell looks at his world straight. No artifice. But with full awareness of the quiet comedy, tenderness and tight-lipped waste. This job need not be done again. Mr. Bridge is a tour de force of contemporary American realism, a beautiful work of fiction." Some reviewers felt that the novel fell short of Con-nell's work in Mrs. Bridge, commenting that the characterization is somewhat weaker in the newer book. However, as John Gross of the New York Review of Books explained: "If Mr. Bridge is a less engaging work than its predecessor, it is chiefly because Walter Bridge himself has little of his wife's pathos. Where she was vulnerable in her innocence, funny and touching in her hapless cultural aspirations, he is rigid, efficient, proud of knowing his own mind. Not an especially likable man; but then Mr. Connell's purpose in writing about him is not to draw up a brief for the defense, but simply to restore a cliché-figure to humanity."

Connell's novel The Alchymist's Journal is a demanding work that features the journal entries of seven sixteenth-century men, all of them attempting alchemy: the transformation of basic metals into gold. Only one of the men is named—Paracelsus, who is based on the actual physician who experimented with new methods of treatment in the 1500s. The other men reflect readily identifiable types, such as a skeptic, a revolutionary, and a philosopher. As with many other Connell works, reviewers of this novel expressed admiration for the author's obvious painstaking research, experimental form, and intellectual daring. Bettina L. Knapp, writing in World Literature Today, praised the "highly cerebral and wisdom-filled work" as a "tour de force." Hudson Review critic William H. Pritchard, while calling the novel "erudite," admitted that "most of the entries were impenetrable to this uninformed sensibility." New York Times Book Review correspondent Sven Birkerts likewise commented that Connell "has here dared the unfashionable—a work that concedes nothing to the reader's appetite for dramatic structure or vivid historical tableaux."

In an interview with Melody Sumner for the San Francisco Review of Books, Connell brushed aside questions about the inaccessibility of The Alchymist's Journal. "I don't write to an audience," he said. "I wanted all seven of the journals to create a unity, but I was trying to avoid repetition. I went over it several times, just to make sure I wasn't using the same words again and again." In this task he succeeded. Birkerts concluded of the novel: "If we are willing to read with sustained attentiveness, facing the otherness and letting the indecipherable elements burn against our demand for clarity, we may at times feel as though we have stepped into a new place. We may get an inkling of what the world felt like some centuries before it assumed its modern contours." Sybil Steinberg, writing in Publishers Weekly, likewise felt that the book "commands thoughtful attention, its surface resplendent with forgotten lore of alchemy, science and love."

In 1995, many of Connell's short stories were collected and published as The Collected Stories of Evan S. Connell. Many of the collection's fifty-six stories were written in the 1950s and 1960s, while most of the remainder were products of the 1990s. All of the stories feature Connell's trademark minimalist prose; many offer wry commentaries on contemporary American life. The character of Koerner, a writer who in some ways resembles Connell, reappears in several of the stories, works that, to quote a Kirkus Reviews contributor, "[sparkle] with Connell's learnedness, sharp wit, and spare, concise prose."

If The Alchymist's Journal deals with the Middle Ages in an interior and cerebral manner, Deus Lo Volt! A Chronicle of the Crusades embraces the panoramic view of the age. A fictitious first-hand account of the European conquest of the Holy Land from 1095 through 1290, the book not only gives a history of the Crusades but also imparts that history from the perspective of a participant—with the enormous differences between the modern and the Medieval mind everywhere incorporated. Calling the novel "a massive, determinedly archaic history of the crusades from the point of view of a French knight," a Publishers Weekly reviewer recommended it as "a great feat of historic empathy." In Booklist, Michael Spinella observed that Connell "researches with the eye of an expert historical scholar and writes with the hand of an expert novelist."

Aside from his works of fiction, Connell's most notable work is Son of the Morning Star, his account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Sioux Indian warriors, led by Sitting Bull, overwhelmed and slaughtered General George Armstrong Custer's band of American troops. A classic story of American history, "Custer's Last Stand" has been the subject of numerous books and articles since the 1880s. But despite the story's familiarity, Connell's account of the battle became a bestseller as well as a critical success. Besides winning a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in history, Son of the Morning Star sold over 80,000 copies in hardcover, and paperback rights were sold for over $200,000. The book's success did not surprise Connell.

Research and writing for the book took Connell four years and involved reading dozens of books on the battle, the diaries of soldiers who participated in the campaign, and accounts by the Indians themselves. He visited the battle site in Montana on four occasions. The resulting manuscript was difficult to sell. Holt, publisher of some of his earlier fiction, declined Son of the Morning Star. They wanted Connell to rewrite the book as a straight biography of Custer or as an overview of the Indian Wars. Connell refused. Eventually North Point Press, a relatively small publisher in California, accepted the book as it was written.

Critical reception to Son of the Morning Star was enthusiastic. Ralph E. Sipper of the Los Angeles Times called it "a monumental study of the philosophical and cultural differences between red and white men that instigated so much mutual animosity and destruction…. In a masterly display of literary structure, Connell has drawn from hundreds of pertinent historical accounts and created the modern equivalent of a biblical work of witness." Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Page Stegner stated that "Connell's narrative of the life and times of General Custer becomes a narrative of the conflict between two cultures, and the battle Custer fought at the Little Bighorn [becomes] a metaphor for all the self-righteous hypocrisy that characterizes Indian-white negotiations to this day." Kenneth Tu-ran, in Time, concluded that Son of the Morning Star is "a new American classic."

Connell became one of several biographers of the Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746–1828) when he published Francisco Goya: A Life. What set his work apart and seemed to puzzle some of his critics was that, as Donna Seaman observed in her Booklist review, Connell seems to be "far more attuned to politics, lust, and eccentricity than he is to art." The biography does relate, however, how Goya's controversial paintings eventually led to his exile in France, and a Kirkus Reviews contributor described Connell's biography of him as "an idiosyncratic consideration" of "the contradictions and dangers inherent in being a member of the establishment during periods of serial oppression and liberation."

Critics were more enthusiastic in their appreciation of Connell's essay collection The Aztec Treasure House: New and Selected Essays. Though most of the essays had been published earlier in The White Lantern and A Long Desire, this edition represents a wide range of subject matter—science, religion, history, exploration, and astronomy, among other topics—that make it "a book to lay up for gloomy afternoons or rainy evenings," as a reviewer commented in the Atlantic Monthly. The collection reflects, as a Publishers Weekly contributor noted, the author's propensity for the "unexpected turns of fate and … strangely compelling details that historians often miss." From the mysteries of the lost city of Atlantis to the discoveries of the astronomer Galileo, and much more, Connell offers his readers a tantalizing panorama of "the human circus," concluded the Atlantic Monthly reviewer. The Publishers Weekly critic predicted that The Aztec Treasure House "will please any history, science or adventure buff."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 2, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 4, 1975, Volume 6, 1976, Volume 45, 1987.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 2: American Novelists since World War II, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1978.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1981, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1982.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, February, 2002, review of The Aztec Treasure House: New and Selected Essays, pp. 102-103.

Booklist, January 1, 2000, Michael Spinella, review of Deus Lo Volt! Chronicle of the Crusades, p. 833; February 1, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Francisco Goya: A Life, p. 941.

Hudson Review, autumn, 1991, William H. Pritchard, review of The Alchymist's Journal, p. 507.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1995, review of The Collected Stories of Evan S. Connell, p. 1126; December 1, 2003, review of Francisco Goya, p. 1388.

Library Journal, March 1, 2000, David Keymer, review of Deus Lo Volt!, p. 123.

Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1984, Ralph E. Sipper, review of Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn,

New York Herald Tribune Book Review, May 26, 1957, Anne Chamberlain, review of The Anatomy Lesson and Other Stories; January 18, 1959, Anne Chamberlain, review of Mrs. Bridge.

New York Review of Books, June 23, 1966; May 17, 1973, John Gross, review of Mr. Bridge.

New York Times, May 19, 1957, Siegfried Mandel, review of The Anatomy Lesson and Other Stories.

New York Times Book Review, January 20, 1985, Page Stegner, review of Son of the Morning Star; April 30, 1989; May 12, 1991, Sven Birkerts, "A World Ripe with Magic."

Playboy, June, 1969, review of Mr. Bridge.

Publishers Weekly, November 20, 1981, Patricia Holt, interview with Evan S. Connell, p. 12; February 22, 1991, Sybil Steinberg, review of The Alchymist's Journal, p. 208; August 21, 1995, review of The Collected Stories of Evan S. Connell, p. 47; Febru-ary 21, 2000, review of Deus Lo Volt!, p. 61; October 2, 2000, "Nine Writers Win Lannan Awards," p. 12; July 2, 2001, review of The Aztec Treasure House, p. 59.

San Francisco Chronicle, May 28, 1957, William Hogan, review of The Anatomy Lesson and Other Stories; January 19, 1959; September 19, 1960.

San Francisco Review of Books, February, 1991, Melody Sumner, interview with Evan S. Connell, p. 26.

Time, November 5, 1984, Kenneth Turan, review of Son of the Morning Star.

Times Literary Supplement, July 29, 1983; August 18, 2000, Emily Wilson, review of Deus lo Volt!, p. 24.

Washington Post Book World, April 20, 1969, Webster Schott, review of Mr. Bridge.

World Literature Today, summer, 1992, Bettina L. Knapp, review of The Alchymist's Journal, p. 526.