[Howard is American novelist, essayist, critic, and autobiographer whose works include the novels Expensive Habits (1986) and Natural History (1992). In the following highly positive review of Mrs. Ted Bliss, she compares Elkin to Mark Twain and Herman Melville, describing him as "an American writer of the first rank."]

[Wolitzer is an American novelist, critic, and author of children's literature. In the following review of Van Gogh's Room at Arles, she praises Elkin's prose style, humor, and compassionate understanding of his characters.]

[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.]

[In the following highly positive review, Milofsky prefaces his comments on Mrs. Ted Bliss with a brief tribute to Elkin's life and works.]

I don't know if Searches and Seizures … is Stanley Elkin's best book, but I'll tell you one thing—it's terrific. I feel as if I should write this in capital letters. No. Not capitals, headlines, maybe: READ ALL BOOKS WRITTEN BY STANLEY ELKIN. That's a little pushy; but if you want to learn to embrace multitudes, or construct catalogues of the crazy, lists of the looney, read Elkin. You'll learn to see pimples on the earlobes of the enormous, and to occ...

All of Elkin's fictions grow from the interaction of the protagonist and his professional role. Professional concerns are the basis upon which the literary structure is built. The fictional structure is not, however, the linear or curvilinear path of the protagonist's career,… but rather the cluster of episodes which dramatize the development of the protagonist's character. Plot is secondary. (p. 198) The hero's occupation is important stylistically as well as structurally...

[Goodman is an American journalist and critic who frequently writes on television for The New York Times. In the following review of Mrs. Ted Bliss, he argues that, though it is not Elkin's best work, it is characteristically intelligent and funny and parts of it will "stay with you after you've given up on the plot."]

[Prose is an American novelist, short story writer, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, she argues that Van Gogh's Room at Arles is Elkin's best book.]

[Arana-Ward is a staff-writer at The Washington Post and former editor of some of Elkin's books. In the following tribute, she discusses Elkin's personality and his desire for a broad readership, one that included more than just other writers.]

[In the following, Grimes reviews Elkin's life and career, noting that "his work veered toward parody and black humor—and his highly wrought sentences formed a dense, self-contained linguistic world."]

The heroes (or antiheroes) of Stanley Elkin's novels have Anglo-Saxon names like Dick Gibson, James Boswell, and George Mills, but once they start to talk any traces of British reserve disappear. And how they love to talk! Once an Elkin character starts a spiel, in fact, there is no stopping him. Not that anyone would want to—the monologues, even those of the shaggy-dog variety, are ebullient, funny, and filled with insights about the sad intricacy of things in this "griefhouse" ...

"George Mills" is a character and condition—"blue-collar blood"—beginning with an eleventh-century English stable boy pressed into the Crusades, reappearing in the early nineteenth century when George IV sends George Mills the forty-third as courier to a Turkish sultan, and ending, the line now defunct, with a middle-aged St. Louis furniture mover who, like the George Millses before him, listens to the hardships of the rich and searches for an audience to tell �...

Stanley Elkin is a "writer's writer," a designation at once happy and sad. Sad because his older titles are not to be found at the nearest paperback store but, with luck, in the used book stalls. His is the sort of name publishing houses like to trot out when accused of Harold Robbins or Robin Moore. Elkin does close-order dialogue as snappy as Heller or Roth, and his eye for contemporary detail is as sharp as Barthelme's. So what's amiss? Let him tell you. Like many moder...

The short and simple annals of the poor have often been the starting point for Stanley Elkin's wild, raunchy imagination. George Mills is no exception, but Elkin strains the rather plot-less framework of the novel by interpolating two long chapters that tell the stories of two historical George Millses: the first, who accompanies his noble master on the First Crusade and does some time in a Polish salt mine; and the forty-third, who (by chance) makes the acquaintance of King George IV and is sent on ...

Stanley Elkin once described his literary taste as delicatessen rather than haute cuisine. "It's that yen for the salami sandwich at the gourmet dinner … it is for the disheveled, what the cat dragged in, the rumpled in spirit," he wrote…. Elkin's taste, of course, is not as lowbrow as he claims. His greatest strength is the ability to combine high art and pop culture without shortchanging either one. His frequent subject is the regular guy with an all-American drea...

The Living End is Stanley Elkin's comic fable of Heaven, Hell and the Last Days, a small book big in every way but length. And I should say at once that this "triptych" … is the work of a master, a story eloquent in its gestures and amazing for the ease with which it moves from a liquor store hold-up in Minneapolis to the "wall-to-wall Wall" of damnation, from Heaven as a "theme park" to Hell as "the ultimate inner city." Half farce, half...

As a novelist, Stanley Elkin has often been too smart for his own good. The outrageous vision … that animates his stories—among the most tightly brilliant published by a contemporary author—has tended to become flaccid over the long haul of a novel. The Dick Gibson Show (1971) offered some hope that Elkin had become able to harness his enormous gifts and deal with the demands of form. But in retrospect, that novel's success seems to have more to do with the accidental confluence ...

Unlike his 18th-century namesake, the hero of this outrageous "modern comedy" [Boswell] is as undiscriminating in his admiration of great men as an autograph collector. His fate, he is told as a boy by an eminent psychologist (his first in-the-flesh celebrity), is to be a holder of coats, a sitter at the captain's table, a persona grata. As a professional wrestler in a bout with The Angel of Death, Boswell suddenly realizes that everybody dies, and the knowledge propels him into a paras...

The fierceness in Stanley Elkin's Boswell is actually in some good part borrowed—not from James Boswell but from Saul Bellow. Mr. Elkin's character named Boswell speaks the wheeling, exuberant language of Augie March, and he has Augie March's penchant for metaphysical categories. Like Augie, too, he is submitted to a succession of tutelary "big personalities," and then he ends by asserting his own contrariety. Like Bellow's Henderson, Boswell is gigantic, rea...

[The Living End] stretches from the moment of Ellerbee's murder until the end of time and space—doomsday. We follow the fortunes of Ellerbee and one Ladlehaus, an accomplice to the crime, through what there is of eternity. We see the Lord in action, giving and taking away, damning and saving, making the occasional error, explaining the ways of Him to men. I leave the reader to discover the explanation, the "state of the art" for himself, suggesting only that it hinges on those at...

I think you will find Stanley Elkin's The Living End either hilariously funny or not funny at all. I managed to hover between the two extremes, finding some of the ripostes very good (a man in hell says, "It's too hot to harbor a grudge") but the main story-line labored and the humor often over-extended. The Living End is divided into three parts to parallel the sections of The Divine Comedy, but there the resemblance ceases. Some of the dialogue is Beckett-like, some of the inve...

["The Living End" is] the work of a man who is desperately trying to joke away death…. [Any] little thing that may go wrong with "The Living End" is justified by the marvelously funny gags and sketches that lie in wait around the next corner. And even in the unlikely event that you get through the first 140 pages without cracking a smile, the novel is worth reading alone for its four-page vision of the Day of Judgment….