Background
Mark Schorer was born Marcus Robert Schorer on May 17, 1908 in Sauk City, Wisconsin, United States, the second of four children of William Carl Schorer, a manufacturer, and Anna Walser.
(1977, hardcover edition. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY. 1...)
1977, hardcover edition. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY. 173 pages. This title presents 10 stories about married life, mixed in with autobiographical sketches of growing up in Sauk City, Wisconsin.
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(Excerpt from The State of Mind: Thirty-Two Stories He sh...)
Excerpt from The State of Mind: Thirty-Two Stories He shoved his hands into his pockets because they'were cold. The smell of autumn was in his nostrils, the pleasant, acrid smell of smoke, and he knew that winter was not far 03. His throat began to ache, for the thought of winter' s closeness saddened him, since winter meant staying at home every night, sitting close to the kitchen stove trying to keep warm by the flames of a bucket of coal he would have scoured the tracks a mile or more to hnd, meant trying to read a book when his throat was choked by fear and waiting. There would be no Sound in the kitchen except the occasi0nal shuffle of coals falling ln the stove, but his mother would be working, patching a coat or a pair of pants that was nearly all patches already, and her grim silence would fill his ears with a more painful sound than any real sound he could' 1mag1ne.0r she would be ironing, and the clatter of the irons on the stove when she changed them would be like a gift as it broke luto the grim silence that clutched at him, like hands tightening on a throat to strangle it, like a weight bearing down and making him breathe hard with a kind of soft fear. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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(A monumental study of one of the most famous authors in t...)
A monumental study of one of the most famous authors in the 20th century by one of the most distinguished literary men of America today, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life will stand for years to come in the select company of definitive American biographies. As described by Mark Schorer, the book is 'a detailed account of Sinclair Lewis' life, from birth to death, a life lived in many places and full of constant peregrination. It was in many ways a disastrous life, full of sordid horror, and the book does not gloss over that. It was also, in many ways, a life full of comedy and buffoonery, and these too find their place in the text. The approach of the book is not literary or critical; it treats Lewis' books & other writings chiefly as events in his life, and events that helped to form his character. The tone is casual and personal, perhaps slightly ironical. The book attempts to locate Lewis in the American literary scene, contrasting and comparing him with his contemporaries, chiefly people whom he actually knew. Lewis is a prime example of that characteristic phenomenon of American literature--the man who enjoys a tremendous & rather early success and then suffers through a long period of decline and deterioration.
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(First edition. "An important examination of the radical e...)
First edition. "An important examination of the radical element in Blake's poetry and society" (Bentley, BB, 2672).
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Mark Schorer was born Marcus Robert Schorer on May 17, 1908 in Sauk City, Wisconsin, United States, the second of four children of William Carl Schorer, a manufacturer, and Anna Walser.
In grammar school, Marcus and a younger friend and rival, August Derleth (who would become a prolific regional writer), haunted the village library. In high school he read Oscar Wilde and J. K. Huysmans.
Deciding to teach and write after receiving his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin (on a Zona Gale Fellowship) in 1929, Schorer was sent to Harvard for a year. In Cambridge, Massachussets he earned a master's degree under the highly civilized professor and poet Robert Hillyer. After graduation he returned to the University of Wisconsin for doctoral studies. He received his Doctor of philosophy in 1936.
While preparing for a career in academe, Schorer began to write fiction. During the summer of 1931, he entered into a joint literary venture with the more disciplined Derleth, renting a cottage on the Wisconsin River and churning out Gothic yarns for Weird Tales. In 1933 he turned to the writing of short stories for magazines such as Harper's and Scribner's.
In 1935 he brought out his first novel, A House Too Old, based on the historical Sauk City and on the splendid dwelling that his grandparents had built there twenty-two years earlier for his parents. Fellowship in the period 1935-1936 enabled Schorer to plan an ambitious book on the mind and poetry of William Blake.
The young scholar taught at Dartmouth College his first year out of Wisconsin and then left to teach at Harvard. In 1940 Schorer was appointed a Biggs-Copeland instructor.
In 1941 he published his second novel, The Hermit Place, a tense psychological tale. Assisted by Guggenheim Fellowships in 1941 and 1943, Schorer worked on his study of Blake, which he began writing in Laguna Beach, California, continued on a sheep ranch near Roswell, and finally completed in Cambridge. During this time, he also wrote stories, literary essays, and newspaper reviews.
With his William Blake: The Politics of Vision (1946) in press and with the expansion of American universities after World War II, Schorer left Cambridge in 1945 to become an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, Schorer taught courses in contemporary literature, critical theory, and story writing. In 1947 he gathered thirty-two of his stories under the title The State of Mind. That same year Schorer was made a full professor at Berkeley and a fellow of the Kenyon College School of English (later the School of Letters, Indiana University).
In 1948 he received another Guggenheim fellowship, this time to write, to study novel theory, and to edit an anthology of criticism. In 1949 he became director of the Christian Gauss Seminar at Princeton University, lecturing there on his theoretical and critical interests. In 1950 he published The Story: A Critical Anthology, a brilliant guide to understanding through close reading and concrete illustrations the limits and possibilities of a complex art form, as well as its relation to the novel.
After a stint as visiting professor at Harvard in 1952, Schorer, recognized as a leading new critic, traveled to Italy as a Fulbright fellow. There he lectured at the University of Pisa, completed his third novel in a Florentine pensione, worked on a biography of D. H. Lawrence, and began researching backward his authorized biography of Minnesotan Sinclair Lewis, who had died in Rome the year before. While still working on his Lewis biography, which he then imagined would take about two years to write, Schorer continued to edit texts and to write on other literary and critical subjects. He was a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo in 1956 and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California, from 1958 to 1959.
In 1960 he became chairman of Berkeley's department of English and a Bollingen fellow. Finally, in 1961, after more than nine years of what became an obsessive involvement in the project, Schorer completed his massive Sinclair Lewis: An American Life.
Following his year as a Fulbright professor at the University of Rome, Schorer stepped down as department chairman at Berkeley in 1965, but he remained active in scholarly and literary associations. In 1966 appeared Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People, a collection of the horror and science fiction collaborations that he and Derleth had dreamed up years before on the banks of the Wisconsin River.
In 1968, Schorer published more recent selections, The World We Imagine, nineteen of his finest essays, prefaces, and lectures on books, writers, and ideas, among them the eloquent "Technique as Discovery" and "The Burdens of Biography. " His biography, D. H. Lawrence, also appeared that year.
At the time of his death in Oakland, California, Schorer's Pieces of Life (1977), a collection of ten short stories interlaced with eleven dark autobiographical sketches, was in press.
(A monumental study of one of the most famous authors in t...)
(Excerpt from The State of Mind: Thirty-Two Stories He sh...)
(1977, hardcover edition. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY. 1...)
(First edition. "An important examination of the radical e...)
In August 15, 1936 Schorer married Ruth Tozier Page of Madison. They had two children.