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Title: Selected Short Stories of Weldon Kees by Weldon Kees, Dana Gioia ISBN: 0-8032-7806-3 Publisher: Bison Bks Corp Pub. Date: October, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Forgotten US Enigma
Comment: :
No one knows how, or when, or even whether, Weldon Kees died. Having talked both of fleeing to Mexico and of suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge, his car was found near the latter on July 18, 1955. No hint of the man has since emerged.
But while he was active, Kees wrote fiction (initially), poetry, and cultural criticism of all kinds for major national periodicals; he painted (abstract expressionism), was a jazz musician, made films, and collaborated with anthropologists and behavioural scientists on various ventures. From his time of relocation to New York until his disappearance, he circled with many of the avant garde leaders in the New York art scene. Brief as his life was, it represents one of the most multi-faceted talents of his, or any, age.
Born in the plains (Beatrice, Nebraska, 1914) to parents operating a hardware store, Kees had several short stories published while in his twenties, but quit writing them altogether by the early forties when he moved east. They (43 in all) thus confine almost exlusively to glum-faced real-life depictions of common folks in depressed, small, mid American towns. Dana Goia has selected about a third of these, those deemed most successful, and includes an informative introduction. Kees, in this work, reflects clearly the social-conditions focus of the thirties throughout the US and presents his small gems in down-keyed, often unresolved, personal reflections and observations on everyday hum-drum existence by a generally undistinguished, often quietly frustrated narrator-protagonist. Generally these are finely edited, simple-language depictions of unfulfilled yearning and coping with material boredom and insignificance.
Stylistically, most are relatively brief and trenchant in their resolute resistance to unfounded optimism. But they are poignant within the simple, disciplined writing, and the reader is pulled gently and feelingly into the glum world of the however hapless, however compromised narrator. All presented in a gray climate unaccommodating of patriotic, religious, or familial panegyric.
Kees is a unique, if minor figure in American 20th century literature, and the thoughtful reader will be rewarded by giving him some time, likely reminded - nostalgically perhaps in the half-tone depression hues Kees uses - of the unadorned nature of the lives most of us lead.
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Title: Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees by James Reidel ISBN: 0803239513 Publisher: University of Nebraska Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees by Weldon Kees, Donald Justice, Donald Rodney Justice ISBN: 0803278098 Publisher: Bison Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Weldon Kees and the Mid-Century Generation: Letters, 1935-1955 by Weldon Kees, Robert E. Knoll ISBN: 080327808X Publisher: Bison Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: W. B. Yeats, a Life: II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939 (WB YEATS A LIFE) by R. F. Foster ISBN: 0198184654 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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Title: It Happened in Boston (Modern Library Classics) by Russell H. Greenan, Jonathan Lethem ISBN: 0812970667 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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