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Fond of fracturing readers' expectations, Stanley Elkin made his most profound impact on his fellow writers. Toward the end of his life, his books were falling out of print, and only specialized editions of some novels were widely available. However, literary critics and fellow novelists have continued to champion Elkin's exuberant innovations in fictional form. What sets Elkin's work apart from that of his contemporaries is his restoring to fiction the primacy of rhetoric. While other novelists experimented with minimalist and metafictional aesthetics, Elkin held out for the centrality of style. Readers often come to a novel expecting style and grace but not anticipating the same demands on attention that poetry often requires. In Elkin's novels, however, rhetoric is not merely decoration but is the substance, the raison d'être, of the entire fictional construct. As he said in "The Rest of the Novel" (1990, collected in Pieces of Soap [1992]), "For conveying ideas, novels are among the least functional and most decorative of the blunt instruments," and aesthetics and style are "the only subject matter."
Stanley Lawrence Elkin was born in New York City on 11 May 1930 into a family with a love for rhetoric and a gift of gab.
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