First Novel, Drive, He Said; Writing Prizes
Larner's first novel, Drive, He Said, won the Delta Prize for first novels in 1964. The prize had gone unclaimed for several years and by then had reached $10,000. The judges were Walter van Tilburg Clark, Mary McCarthy and Leslie Fiedler. For the title of this novel, Larner chose a line from the poem I Know a Man by Robert Creeley.
The heroes of Drive, He Said were a college basketball star who has mixed feelings about his stardom and what is expected of him and his revolutionary roommate, who eventually burns the campus down. The reviewer in Playboy magazine echoed the establishment verdict when he said, "Nothing like this could happen in America."
In 1964, Larner won the Aga Khan Prize from The Paris Review, for the best short story of the year, "O the Wonder!"
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