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Interview
with the Glossbrenners
Listing
of the 125 Authors
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About
the Author: 17 Juicy Bits from the Book |
Alfred
and Emily Glossbrenner share 17 author facts that readers may not
know.
Jeffrey
Archer.
Owns the Playhouse, a theater in London's West End. He's also an
avid art collector. In 1998 he bought Andy Warhol's 1982 portrait
of Diana, Princess of Wales, who had been a personal friend. Valued
at more than $8.5 million, the portrait depicts the Princess with
green and black hair. "Earl Spencer saw it at a private showing,"
Archer says, "and he was delighted."
Margaret
Atwood. On gardening: "I'm not a very good gardener, for
the same reason I wouldn't make a very good poisoner: both activities
benefit from advance planning. I get seduced by catalogues, with
their glossy photos and adjectives, and by pictures of rose-covered
trellises and beds of mature perennials; but somehow you can't just
throw all that into the ground on the first Sunday in May. Then
there's the upkeep. Over the years, my various gardens have shared
a certain improvised look, which on closer inspection may turn out
to be weeds. I have taken to calling these 'native wildflowers.'"
Jane
Austen. Sense and Sensibility was first published in
1811.The title page read simply "By a Lady," and the book
was advertised as an "Interesting Novel"-meaning that
it was a love story. Austen promised to cover her publisher's losses
if necessary, but she made a profit of £140. Not bad when
you consider that her father's annual salary as rector was £600.
Saul
Bellow. Author/journalist James Atlas worked for so long on
Bellow: A Biography that by the time it was published late
in 2000 to generally good reviews, it had become something of a
smirk in New York literary circles. But Atlas's is not the only
biographical treatment of the great author. In 1997 Fromm International
published Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow by Harriet
Wasserman. Wasserman was Bellow's one-time lover (literally
one time) and long-time literary agent (30 years). Their business
relationship ended in 1995 when Bellow signed with Andrew Wylie,
the "Dark Prince" (black tie, black shirt, black coat)
super-agent of New York. Wasserman used to type Bellow's novels
and note his editorial changes in seven-hour phone calls, so she
was less than pleased when he decided to jump ship.
Truman
Capote. One of his childhood friends in Alabama was a young
tomboy named Harper Lee, who later wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.
Capote appears in the novel as Dill Harris, the pale, blonde child
who had an imagination as big as the universe.
Agatha
Christie. By far the most intriguing episode of Agatha Christie's
life is her still largely unexplained disappearance for 11 days
in 1926. Rumored to have faked her own death to implicate her cheating
husband, Christie eventually reappeared, claiming amnesia, after
an extensive manhunt. The events of those 11 days were made into
the fictionalized 1979 film Agatha, starring Vanessa Redgrave.
More recently, they were the subject of a 1997 BBC documentary and
a book, Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days, by Jared
Cade, one of the research consultants for the documentary.
Tom
Clancy. Lives in a large, gated estate on the Chesapeake Bay
in Huntingtown, Maryland, with a pool, football field, tennis court,
indoor pistol range, and a World War II-vintage tank that serves
as a lawn ornament. Clancy writes at a computer in the library of
his home, surrounded by over 3,000 books-and 200 military hats.
He begins each morning at 8:00 a.m. by editing his previous day's
output. Then he writes until lunchtime. He averages 10 manuscript
pages a day and does not work from an outline!
Patricia
Cornwell. Whether it means going on night patrol with the police
in the subway tunnels of New York-the crack vials crunching under
foot and the rats skittering over her boots-or placing her gloved
hand in the chest cavity of a corpse and being startled to find
that the blood is cold, Cornwell tries to experience first-hand
what she later has her characters experience. Nervous about security
(she knew one of the female serial murder victims in the real-life
case that inspired Postmortem), she often travels with bodyguards.
And she carries one or more pistols at all times: a .357 Colt Python,
a .380 Walther semiautomatic, and a .38 Smith & Wesson. Her
main character, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, in contrast, carries a Glock
9-millimeter, a favorite of law-enforcement officials.
Don
DeLillo. Left Ogilvy & Mather at age 28 and set about completing
Americana, his first novel. "I quit my job just to quit.
I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work
anymore." He wanted to call his eighth novel Panasonic,
meaning "sound everywhere," but attorneys from a certain
Japanese electronics firm objected. Underworld, his eleventh
novel, was bought by Scribner's for a purported $1.3 million. The
next day, DeLillo's agent sold the screen rights to Paramount for
close to $1 million. DeLillo insists on using a manual typewriter.
"The physical sensation of hitting keys and watching hammers
strike the page is such an integral part of the way I think and
even the way I see words on the page that I'd be reluctant to give
it up. That is, there's a sculptural quality to me, of letter-by-letter,
word-by-word, linear progress across a piece of paper as I type….
It's actually sensuous."
F.
Scott Fitzgerald. At the peak of his fame in 1929, The Saturday
Evening Post paid Fitzgerald $4,000 for a story, the equivalent
of about $40,000 in 1990s money. But he was not among the highest
paid writers of the day. Indeed, during the 1920s his income from
all sources rarely topped $25,000 a year-a nice living back then,
but certainly not a fortune.
Richard
Ford. After years of perceived misreadings, gratuitous categorizations,
and outright vicious pans (one critic said that his novel The
Ultimate Good Luck "calls to mind a cheap action picture
in which hastily collaborating hacks didn't quite manage to put
a story together"), Richard Ford has a notorious dislike for
reviews. When asked about the rumor that he had shot a critic's
recently published novel with a gun, he denied it. It was actually
his wife, Kristina, who carried the book into their backyard and
used it for target practice. The book's author had written unfavorably
about Ford in The New York Times, and they sent the bullet-riddled
tome to his editor.
C.
S. Forester. Real name: Cecil Louis Troughton Smith. Author
of The African Queen and Sink the Bismarck! in addition
to all the Hornblower novels. From Winston Churchill's The Grand
Alliance: "For the first time for many months I could read
a book for pleasure. Oliver Lyttelton, Minister of State in Cairo,
had given me Captain Hornblower, R.N., which I found vastly entertaining.
When a chance came, I sent him the message, 'I find Hornblower admirable.'
This caused perturbation in the Middle East Headquarters, where
it was imagined that 'Hornblower' was the code-word for some special
operation of which they had not been told."
Sue
Grafton. Where did Sue Grafton get the idea for her "alphabet
mystery" series? According to Ms. Grafton, the concept came
from a delightfully wicked book of cartoons by Edward Gorey called
The Gashlycrumb Tinies, in which little Victorian children
are "done in" by various means: "A is for Amy who
fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by Bears, C is for
Clara who wasted away…."
Robert
Jordan. Author of the phenomenally successful "Wheel of
Time" fantasy novels, James Oliver Rigney Jr. (his real name)
graduated from The Citadel with a BS in physics in 1974. He served
two tours in Vietnam with the U.S. Army, winning the Distinguished
Flying Cross and the Bronze Star. Rigney has also written historical
novels under the name Reagan O'Neal (The Fallon Blood, The Fallon
Pride, and The Fallon Legacy) and westerns under the name Jackson
O'Reilly (Cheyenne Riders), and he has contributed articles to periodicals
such as Library Journal, Fantasy Review, and Science Fiction Review
under the name Chang Lung. He is also the author of seven novels
in the popular "Conan the Barbarian" series.
Wally
Lamb. In 1991, high-school-teacher Wally Lamb was on his hands
and knees scraping a wad of chewing gum from the classroom floor
when publisher Judith Regan called. (The same Judith Regan whose
talk show airs each weekend on the Fox Network.) She'd just finished
reading the manuscript for She's Come Undone and offered
to buy it for an advance of $150,000-a phenomenal sum for a first
novel. Lamb used part of the money to purchase a new Honda, his
family's first air-conditioned car.
Larry
McMurtry is one of the country's leading antiquarian book dealers.
In fact, his dream is to create, in his hometown of Archer City,
Texas, an American version of Hay-on-Wye, the legendary British
village that attracts dealers and book lovers from around the world.
He's well on his way, with over 30,000 volumes in four huge buildings.
Richard
Wright. Author of Native Son (1940), Black Boy: A
Record of Childhood and Youth, (1945), Richard Wright was among
the first African-American writers to achieve literary fame and
fortune and today is generally considered one of the most influential
writers of this century. After finishing formal schooling at age
15, he began to read widely, starting with H. L. Mencken, whose
books he borrowed from the Memphis "whites only" public
library by forging a note from a white patron: "Dear Madam:
Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?"
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