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Re: RARA-AVIS: _Hardboiled America_ and writer biographies
>It struck me that the Thompson revival was pretty big, for him to go
>from having little public history to being the subject of an
>award-winning (and thick) biography.
When I spoke to Polito during a reading here a couple of months ago he
discussed the renewal of interest in Thompson as being almost entirely
due to the film versions of his stories that came out in the past five
years or so, most notably "The Grifters." What was interesting about
this to me was that the crowd during the readin, largely college age, had
no idea that the movies he rattled off had come from this "unheard-of"
writer.
BTW, in the reading he stopped with the passage of Thompson's recovery
from the brink of the grave as an exhausted, alcoholic who was warned
that any further exertion on his part would mean death, only to come home
to the news that his father had lost his son's entire savings in a
questionable business deal. That was a much better cliffhanger for that
audience than anything a television series could come up with!
Patrick
Patrick Golden ++ pgolden@leo.vsla.edu
Program Services Manager
Williamsburg Regional Library, Virginia ++ http://www.wrl.org
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