Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Geoffrey Wolff

Critical Essay by Geoffrey Wolff

SOURCE: "Remembering Stanley Elkin, Master of Excess," in The New York Times Book Review, September 17, 1995, p. 43.

[Wolff, an American novelist, biographer, essayist, and educator, was a close friend of Elkin's. In the following reminiscence, he describes the author's "extravagant" literary style and the irreverence, tenacity, and "breath-stopping candor" with which he lived his life.]

It wasn't enough to have written many singular novels and collections of stories and novellas and essays, every piece of work surprising. It didn't suffice to be Merle King Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis. It was too paltry a blessing to be eligible for Social Security payments, too miserly a bounty to be celebrated by fellow writers for the richest, most supple and idiomatic and muscular and elegantly cadenced American sentences since William Faulkner's. Stanley Elkin, all appetite, wanted more. He confessed his longing to be a "crossover"...
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