STERN, Richard (Gustave) 1928-

PERSONAL: Born February 25, 1928, in New York, NY; son of Henry George (a dentist) and Marion (Veit) Stern; married Gay Clark, March 14, 1950 (divorced, February, 1972); married Alane Rollings, August 9, 1985; children: (first marriage) Christopher, Kate, Andrew, Nicholas. Education: University of North Carolina, B.A., 1947; Harvard University, M.A., 1949; University of Iowa, Ph.D., 1954.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, University of Chicago, 1050 East 59th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

CAREER: Jules Ferry College, Versailles, France, lecturer, 1949-50; University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany, lecturer, 1950-51; educational advisor, U.S. Army, 1951-52; Connecticut College, New London, CT, instructor, 1954-55; University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, assistant professor, 1956-61, associate professor, 1962-64, professor of English, 1965—, Helen Regenstein professor of English, 1990—. Visiting lecturer, University of Venice, 1962-63, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1964 and 1968, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1966, Harvard University, 1969, University of Nice, 1970, University of Urbino, 1977.

MEMBER: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Philological Society (University of Chicago), Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Longwood Award, 1960; Friends of Literature Award; Rockefeller grant, 1965; Stitch was selected as one of the American Library Association's books of the year, 1965; National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, 1968; Guggenheim fellowship, 1973-74; Carl Sandburg Award, Friends of the Chicago Public Library, 1979, for Natural Shocks; Award of Merit for the Novel, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1986; Chicago Sun-Times book of the year award for Noble Rot: Stories, 1949-1988, 1989; Heartland Award, best work of non-fiction, 1995.

WRITINGS:

Golk (novel), Criterion (Torrance, CA), 1960.

Europe; or, Up and Down with Schreiber and Baggish (novel), McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1961, published as Europe; or, Up and Down with Baggish and Schreiber, MacGibbon & Kee (London, England), 1962.

In Any Case (novel), McGraw, 1963, published as The Chaleur Network, Second Chance (Sag Harbor, NY), 1981.

Teeth, Dying, and Other Matters [and] The Gamesman's Island: A Play, Harper (New York, NY), 1964.

Stitch (novel), Harper (New York, NY), 1965.

(Editor) Honey and Wax: Pleasures and Powers of Narrative, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1966.

1968: A Short Novel, an Urban Idyll, Five Stories, and Two Trade Notes, Holt (New York, NY), 1970.

The Books in Fred Hampton's Apartment (essays), Dutton (New York, NY), 1973.

Other Men's Daughters (novel), Dutton (New York, NY), 1973.

Natural Shocks (novel), Coward, McCann and Geoghegan (New York, NY), 1978.

Packages (short-story collection), Coward, McCann and Geoghegan (New York, NY), 1980.

The Invention of the Real (collected essays and poems), University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1982.

A Father's Words (novel), Arbor House (New York, NY), 1986.

The Position of the Body, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1986.

Noble Rot: Stories, 1949-1988, Grove Press (New York, NY), 1988.

Shares and Other Fictions, Delphinium (Harrison, NY), 1992.

One Person and Another: On Writers and Writing, Baskerville (Dallas, TX), 1993.

A Sistermony, Donald I. Fine (New York, NY), 1995.

Pacific Tremors (novel), Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 2001.

Contributor to numerous periodicals, including Partisan Review and the New York Times. Manuscript collection is housed at the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

SIDELIGHTS: "Richard Stern is American letters' unsung comic writer about serious matters," Doris Grumbach wrote in the Chicago Tribune. "He is, further, that oddity among novelists, a writers' writer, a critics' writer, whose name is not part of household vocabulary." Unlike Saul Bellow, with whom he shares artistic and thematic concerns, Stern has not gained wide recognition in popular circles or among the mainstream of academe. As Julian Barnes observed in New Statesman, "An obstinate and selfish attachment to lucidity debars his work from the attention of problem-solving academics; while his tense intelligence discourages holiday skimmers." Yet the long-time University of Chicago professor, in over fifty years of writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, has earned a significant amount of respect in the world of literature, as is evidenced by the Award of Merit for the Novel he received in 1986 from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Stern's approach to writing has often been at the heart of critical evaluation of his work. "A novelist who began by writing poetry," Peter Straub noted in New Statesman, "[he] was always concerned with, and fiercely delighted by, the possibilities within language and narrative technique, and shares with the best American prose its self-awareness and daring." Typically, in his writing less means more. "Stern's short stories are short," explained New Republic contributor Mark Harris. "His novels and reportage have always been concise, compressed. Economy of language is his rule." As the reviewer pointed out, this characteristic, while viewed by Stern's proponents as an important strength, may be one of the reasons the author's works have not enjoyed more popular readership. "This is regrettable," Harris concluded, "since, if the task of reading him requires a greater concentration than we are accustomed to apply to mere jewels of literary art, the reward of reading him is proportionately greater as well."

Stern emerged on the literary scene in 1960, publishing his first novel in that year and two others by 1963. "What struck one from the first was Stern's command of the novelist's resources: an ample and supple language, a lively, vigorous narrative style, a sense of character and scene, of place, person and significant action," Saul Maloff asserted in Commonweal. "The generosity and sophistication of his mind, those characteristics which emerge first in depth of style, evident in his first novel, Golk, were fully present a year later in his second, Europe; or, Up and Down with Baggish and Schreiber," commented Straub, "giving deep tones to that book's comedy—the bank he's been drawing on ever since." Of Stern's third novel, In Any Case, a story of espionage and treason during World War II, Straub added: "Every chapter is packed with knowhow and knowingness, a hundred different kinds of sentence, stunning usages, metaphorically apt information, brilliant speculation and question."

In his 1973 novel, Other Men's Daughters, Stern addresses the theme of a middle-aged, married man's love for a young college student. Robert Merriwether, a doctor who teaches at Harvard University, is caught in an unhappy marriage to Sara when he meets Cynthia, half his age, "beautiful, witty, intelligent, understanding, well-educated and wholly in love with him," wrote New York Times critic Anatole Broyard. "He is decent, kindly and modest, she is eager, intelligent and sad, and without his wife or her father their relationship would have no problems," a Times Literary Supplement reviewer observed, "unless one perversely concludes that without these problems there would be no relationship, a view Merriwether himself seems to have some time for."

Other Men's Daughters "is a consideration, at once witty and painful, of marital malaise, extra-marital rejuvenation and the hard emotional burdens attendant to both," wrote Jonathan Yardley in Washington Post Book World. While the reviewer pointed out that the novel's subject is nothing new—it is, in fact, common to the time in which it was written—he admitted, "I cannot recall its being treated elsewhere in recent fiction with more fidelity to and understanding of the truths of separation, divorce and readjustment."

Here as before, Stern's technique and style drew significant critical attention. James R. Frakes commented in the New York Times Book Review that "though not really experimental in structure, Other Men's Daughters makes use of some unusual time-patterns, with convolutions and overlays, flashbacks and flashforwards." In the reviewer's opinion, "The end result is not obscurantism but enrichment."

New York Review of Books contributor Michael Wood focused on the style conveyed in the novel. "Style," he wrote, "is what saves buried lives from extinction, style is the mark of an exceptional and delicate attention." Moreover, according to Wood, "Stern has a style in a perfectly old-fashioned sense, and Other Men's Daughters is an old-fashioned novel, an impressive plea for the private life as a continuing subject for serious fiction."

Natural Shocks examines another, yet more complicated, relationship between an older man and a younger woman. Frederick Wursup, a worldly, caustic journalist, accepts an assignment for an article on death. His subject becomes Cicia, a young woman losing her battle with cancer. As he becomes more involved with Cicia's case, Wursup's private feelings begin to intrude on his professional decisions, and he starts to realize, as Newsweek's Peter S. Prescott observed, "how fully his life had become mired in the trivialities of his profession, how stunted his education in feeling."

Prescott found the author of Natural Shocks "a remarkably deft and witty writer" and characterized the novel as "wound so tight as to have a springy texture; aphorisms abound." National Review contributor Paul Lukacs, however, expressed reservations about Stern's emphasis on idea over character. He described Natural Shocks's supporting characters as "formless; they are specimens of life . . . but they are not characters in a work of fiction." He also argued that the novel is not so much the story of Wursup's growing self-awareness, but rather "in truth it is about Stern's one dominant idea—namely, a man's relationship with death and with his self."

New York Times book reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt drew different conclusions. He wrote that the novel "has a superstructure that is as solid and timeless as a folktale, . . . fairly teems with vividly realized men and women, . . . and prose—energetic, muscular, intelligent, playful prose, bristling with epigrams and allusions, yet never distracting from the onward rush of the story it unfolds." Furthermore, Lehmann-Haupt remarked that "the book is about death, yes, but more than that, it is about the deaths of fathers and children and lovers and mentors. And it is about journalism—public events viewed by public men for the consumption of the public. And about the relationship between the public and the private."

In his 1986 novel A Father's Words, Stern offers the story of Cy Riemer, editor of a Chicago science newsletter, and his four grown children. Divorced from his children's mother, Cy is beginning a relationship with a young girlfriend and trying to set in order his relationships with his sons and daughters. "Family is the novel's subject," wrote Geoffrey Wolff in Los Angeles Times Book Review, "and particularly the idiom of a particular family, particularly American."

Central to this examination of the family is Cy's troubles with his son Jack. "The discord between father and son is one of the oldest stories and traditionally told from the son's point of view," commented Prescott in another Newsweek article. But as the reviewer pointed out, "What Stern has done here is to explore it from the father's perspective." This break from tradition can also be seen in the role given Cy in this novel. In an interview with Garry Abrams published in the Los Angeles Times, the author discussed his novel and the changing nature of fatherhood in our day and age. Fathers are "having relationships with their children that they didn't have in the past," Stern said. "The father is a competitor, a brother, a friend in a way that didn't exist for most of human history.... The old paternal-filial decorum is under a lot of pressure."

In A Father's Words, commented John Bowers in the New York Times Book Review, "Stern gives us a glimmer of fatherhood and how it goes to the marrow of one's bones." The author creates his portrait of the present-day father "by forgoing straight narrative and employing intelligent bits of business, little snippets of comment, disregarding sequence of time," Bowers added. This effort earned Stern praise from New York Times contributor John Gross. The reviewer wrote: "he is an unusually crisp and intelligent writer, with a sharp edge to his wit; and in A Father's Words he runs true to form. Many of the book's pleasures are incidental: jokes, intellectual cadenzas, agile turns of phrase." Bowers concluded, "Richard Stern may be compared to a jeweler. He worries and frets and tinkers to get the smallest matters just right—the jewellike Father's Words is an example."

A collection of Stern's short works of fiction are found in Noble Rot: Stories, 1949-1988. The title alludes to the putrid soil that is necessary to produce fine wines. Among the characters in the book's thirty-two stories are what Sven Birkerts of New Republic called "grumbling husbands and wives, depressed grad students, small-time operators, lovelorn spinsters, struggling retirees....All have been rendered with a fascination for circumstance and setting . . . and with an eye for their psychological particularity." David R. Slavitt observed in American Book Review that "the stories are lively, well-crafted pieces, with a tough-guy Chicago voice that allows the narrator a certain freedom."

Stern stayed with the shorter form in his next book, Shares and Other Fictions, which contains two novellas and several short stories. The theme of the collection is the uncertain emotional ground between fathers and sons. "This ancient theme becomes original in Stern's hands," wrote Joseph Coates for Chicago Tribune Book World, "because it is handled so consistently from the father's viewpoint." In One Person and Another, a collection of essays also culled from a period of forty years, Stern examines the literary world with his usual forthright style. "Stern's observations are resolutely intelligent and interesting," noted August Kleinzahler of Small Press, who added that the author is "opinionated and proud of it." Mark Shechner of the Chicago Tribune wrote, "This flurry of auto-compilation is good news for the reader who has acquired a taste for that mixture of piquant detail and sharp irony that is Stern's signature." Among the subjects for Stern's analysis are twentieth-century authors Lillian Hellman, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, Joyce Carol Oates, and Norman Mailer. The collection also includes a satirical play that speculates on how Dante and Shakespeare would fare in a modern litigious society.

In the memoir titled Sistermony, Stern chronicles his sister's battle with uterine cancer and his own insights into their ambivalent relationship. The effect, according to Scott Donaldson of the Chicago Tribune, is far from a romantic tribute. While Stern honestly presents what he considers his sister's shortcomings, the author is even harder on himself. But, as Donaldson noted, "as Ruth's illness runs its course, Richard begins to emerge from such obsessive self-repugnance into what his sister meant to him." This new insight also extends to other areas of the writer's life. A review in the Los Angeles Book Review chided Stern for the book's solipsism, but for Aaron Cohen of Booklist, the book's wide-ranging scope was a sign of craft. "Stern can conjure up a complex characterization in a few paragraphs," he commented.

After a long spell away from novels, Stern published Pacific Tremors, about which Donna Seaman commented in Booklist, "Happily, this vital and extraordinarily touching novel about two old friends and the romance of movies exceeds all expectations." The "old friends" are a renowned movie director, Ezra Kenert, and a film historian, Wendell Spear, an aging pair dealing with the literal and emotional implications involved in the realization that their creative days are drawing to an end. "The specters of physical disability and loss of vocation provide tension of one sort, while flashbacks and flash-forwards reveal familial problems," wrote Jack Hafer for Library Journal. "Mirroring the unsteady emotional condition of those living on the Pacific Rim, the title is fitting." Richard Schickel noted in his review of the book in the Los Angeles Times that here, Stern "flirts with the discovery of myth." While he commented that Stern gives little time to "detail and structural nicety," nor has a realistic grasp on the workings of the film industry, Schickel called the book ". . . artful, eccentric and pleasing . . . flawed in [its] way but notably—sometimes even nobly—resistant to the conventions of Hollywood fictions, the cliches of Hollywood historiography." Seaman concluded her review by commenting: "Stern covers a stupendous amount of emotional territory with verve and masterful economy, expressing great warmth and affection for humanity, fretful creatures bedazzled by illusion yet devoted to truth."

Stern's writing stands apart from much of the fiction created by his contemporaries in that, as Charles Monaghan suggested in Commonweal, it concentrates on "personal moral questions." David Kubal elaborated on the author's place in contemporary fiction in an essay in Hudson Review: "Mr. Stern's lucidity, together with his capacity for affection and the comic, are very rare qualities, shortages in contemporary literature. The informed reading public, at least, wants its fictive realities uncontaminated by an author's suggestion that human character is greater than its circumstances, or that the condition itself has its goodness, or that anyone should be forgiven or tolerated." Yet, as Kubal concluded, "That Mr. Stern continues to offer these consolations in a body of work . . . tells us of his artistic integrity."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, October-November, 1994, David R. Slavitt, review of Noble Rot: Stories, 1949-1988.

Booklist, June 15, 1992; October 15, 1993; February 15, 1995, p. 1054; December 15, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of Pacific Tremors, p. 705.

Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1986; December 11, 1986; January 22, 1989; October 31, 1993, p. 6; March 19, 1995, p. 3.

Chicago Tribune Book World, April 6, 1986; September 6, 1992, pp. 4-5.

Commonweal, May 13, 1960, Charles Monaghan, "New Traditions," review of Golk, pp. 188-190; December 14, 1962, Saul Maloff, "A Personal Quest," review of In Any Case, pp. 319-320.

Hudson Review, autumn, 1981, David Kubal, review of Packages, pp. 458-459.

Library Journal, January, 2002, Jack Hafer, review of Pacific Tremors, p. 155.

Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1986; February 17, 1989; October 11, 1992; April 2, 1995; February 10, 2002, Richard Schickel, review of Pacific Tremors, p. R-2.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 9, 1986, Geoffrey Wolff, review of A Father's Words, p. 1; April 2, 1995, p.6.

National Review, May 26, 1978.

New Republic, November 15, 1980, Mark Harris, review of Packages; February 20, 1989.

New Statesman, May 10, 1974, Peter Straub, pp. 668-669; September 22, 1978, Julian Barnes, review of Natural Shocks, pp. 377-378.

Newsweek, January 2, 1978; November 3, 1980, Peter S. Prescott, review of Packages, p. 88; March 24, 1986.

New York Review of Books, August 13, 1970; December 13, 1973, Michael Wood, review of Other Men's Daughters, pp. 19-23; February 23, 1978, Roger Sale, review of Natural Shocks, pp. 42-44.

New York Times, October 16, 1973, Anatole Broyard, review of Other Men's Daughters, p. 41; January 9, 1978, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Natural Shocks, p. C29; April 11, 1986.

New York Times Book Review, May 1, 1960; October 14, 1962; December 19, 1965; March 25, 1973; November 18, 1973, James R. Frakes, review of Other Men's Daughters, pp. 4-5; January 1, 1978, Anatole Broyard, review of Natural Shocks, pp. 12, 21; January 9, 1978; September 7, 1980; June 15, 1986; September 27, 1992.

Partisan Review, spring, 1965.

Publishers Weekly, January 20, 1989; June 22, 1992; January 2, 1995, pp. 64-65.

Saturday Review, December 11, 1965; January 21, 1978.

Small Press, spring, 1994, August Kleinzahler, review of One Person and Another, p. 79.

Times Literary Supplement, May 10, 1974, review of Other Men's Daughters, p. 493; October 27, 1978; November 21, 1980, Nicholas Spoliar, review of Packages, p. 1342.

Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1983.

Washington Post, May 9, 1986.

Washington Post Book World, October 28, 1973, Jonathan Yardley, review of Other Men's Daughters; October 19, 1980; February 1, 1987.*