Sorrentino, Gilbert 1929-2006

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 27, 1929, in New York, NY; died of lung cancer, May 18, 2006, in New York, NY. Educator, editor, and author. Sorrentino was an award-winning, critically acclaimed author best known for Mulligan Stew (1979), though his innovative fiction never drew a large readership. During his early career, he worked a variety of jobs, including as a packer, reinsurance clerk, messenger, and shipping room supervisor, and attended Brooklyn College from 1950 to 1951, and again from 1955 to 1957. Sorrentino later settled into publishing work, first as editor and publisher of the magazine Neon in the late 1950s, then as a book editor for Kulchur for three years and as editor at Grove Press in the late 1960s. After publishing the poetry collections The Darkness Surrounds Us (1960) and Black and White (1964), and his first novel, The Sky Changes (1966), he began transitioning into a career in academia. Despite lacking a college degree, Sorrentino was a self-taught intellectual who spoke several languages and was well versed in literature. He was thus welcomed at universities and taught briefly at Columbia University, the Aspen Writers Workshop, and Sarah Lawrence College, before joining the New School in 1976. Except for a year at the University of Scranton, he taught at Sarah Lawrence through 1982. Finally, Sorrentino joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he was an English professor from 1982 until his 1999 retirement. As an author, Sorrentino published over a half dozen collections of verse through the early 1980s, but he was even better known for penning highly experimental novels. He was fearless in doing away with conventional techniques, playing with narrative, dialogue, and plot, often satirizing different authors and genres, and mixing styles and genres within the same story. His bestknown experimental novel is Mulligan Stew, in which he freely parodied genres such as Westerns, detective fiction, and even pornography. Because they threw conventional technique out the window, his books were often difficult for readers to comprehend, and while some literary critics found his work groundbreaking, others just considered it frustrating and disorganized. Despite his inability to win a large audience, however, Sorrentino wrote in the style of his choosing, unconcerned about whether his novels and poems were widely accepted. Still, he garnered a number of literary awards, including the 1981 John Dos Passos Prize, the 1985 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and a PEN/

Faulkner nomination in 2003 for his last novel, Little Casino (2002). Among his other poetry books are The Perfect Fiction (1968), A Dozen Oranges (1976), and Selected Poems, 1958-1980 (1981); his list of novels includes sixteen titles, among them Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971), Odd Number (1985), Pack of Lies: A Trilogy (1997), and Gold Fools (2001).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, May 26, 2006, section 3, p. 9.

Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2006, p. B11.

New York Times, May 22, 2006, p. A23.

Washington Post, May 24, 2006, p. B7.