While working on a carefully guarded film project in 1982, Steven Spielberg invited the versatile writer William Kotzwinkle to Hollywood. Spielberg had read and enjoyed Kotzwinkle's vivid evocation of the ethos of the late 1960s hippie counterculture...

William Kotzwinkle published over two dozen books of fiction in the last three decades of the twentieth century, making his mark in virtually every genre, including mystery, science fiction, social satire, erotica, historical fiction, film...

William Kotzwinkle (born 1943) is an author and screenwriter. He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His most popular works to date include the novelization of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (on which he collaborated with Melissa Mathison, the original...

A neglected, then rediscovered, but still under-appreciated American novel is The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle. [1] Its protagonist is Horse Badorties, an aging stoned-out, wild-eyed, unbathed Lower East-Side New York hippie, who wears unmatched tennis shoes and carries an incredibly stuffed satchel...

The two cult authors return, via Houghton and Vintage They both sport beards and live in rural isolation far from the centers of publishing. At first glance that would seem to be the only common ground trod by the urbane J.P. Donleavy,...

[I imagine that Doctor Rat] is going to sound funny as hell (it isn't). I imagine that we will be told by some otherwise intelligent people that it's the kind of funny book that's going to make a lot of angry people a whole lot angrier (it won't). And worse, it's simply a bad book, a puffed-up book, claiming humility. An animal fable with a presumed moral purpose behind it, the book, at a glance, might seem promising enough. A satire on the atrocities of human experimentat...

Doctor Rat is a very contemporary novel by a writer who knows what the contemporary novel is for, and it tries to deliver what the times demand—an examination of modern society and a little conscience-forging for the race. It's an unashamed moral statement which upends verismo to get at basic truths. Although it's often funny, it's a very serious work which demands to be taken seriously. In spite of the respect for the author's talent that reading it inspires in me, taking...

While technically sportive and sometimes successfully lyrical, William Kotzwinkle's novel about man's inhumanity to rats, dogs, snakes, lions, elephants, bears, whales, turtles, etc. is so recklessly sentimental in its argument as to be food fit for Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme and other such fauna children. "Doctor Rat" did not quite make me want to go out and shoot dachshunds; but it did not persuade me, as it seems to have meant to, that laboratory research, using animals, into th...