Life
Brodkey was raised in University City, Missouri outside St. Louis. After graduating from Harvard University in 1952, Brodkey began his writing career by contributing short stories to The New Yorker and other magazines. His stories have won him two first-place O. Henry Awards. In 1993 Brodkey announced in The New Yorker that he had contracted AIDS. He later wrote This Wild Darkness about his battle with the disease. At the time of his death in 1996, he was living in New York City with his wife, novelist Ellen Brodkey (née Ellen Schwamm).
Brodkey is most famous for his long-awaited novel A Party of Animals, which was eventually published (perhaps only in part) as The Runaway Soul (1991).
He died of complication of AIDS.
Read more about this topic: Harold Brodkey
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Take a timber
That you shall find lies in the cellar, charred
Among the raspberries, and hew and shape it
For a doorsill or other corner piece
In a new cottage on the ancient spot.
The life is not yet all gone out of it.
And come and make your summer dwelling here....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)