Background
Daniel Fuchs was born in the Lower East Side, Manhattan, but his family migrated to Williamsburg, Brooklyn while Fuchs was an infant.
(These three novels of the 1930s constitute an American cl...)
These three novels of the 1930s constitute an American classic. In their own way, they do for the Jewish immigrants of Brooklyn what Studs Lonigan did for the Irish of Chicago. So it is no surprise that, upon their first publication, Lonigan's creator welcomed them in a review for The Nation, praising Fuchs's keen eye, excellent ear for dialogue, and quick perception of the grotesque, the whimsical, the tragic. "I know of few novelists in America today," James T. Farrell said, "who possess Fuchs's natural talent and energy or his sense of life." In his 80s Fuchs wrote: "I used to go on long walks . . . take in the street sights at night. I freely used the sights and happenings in the three novels I wrote in my 20s: Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), and Low Company (1937). . .I had 'ideas' for each of these books, but I soon tired of them, ideas being -- for me, at any rate -- unsatisfactory. I abandoned them. . .and devoted myself simply to the tenement: the life in the hallways, the commotion at the dumbwaiters, the assortment of characters in the building, their strivings and preoccupations, their troubles in the interplay of the sexes. There was always a ferment, slums or no slums. The slums didn't hold them down." Time hasn't held down these novels, either. Like Joseph Mitchell's New York sketches of the same period, they are as alive today as the day they were first printed, as tropical-rainforest lush, as exuberant. What's true remains so, and Farrell spoke the truth back in 1937: there are still few novelists in America today who possess Fuchs's talent, his energy, his sense of life.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/157423210X/?tag=2022091-20
( Book jacket/back: In this beloved novel of immigrant li...)
Book jacket/back: In this beloved novel of immigrant life in Brooklyn, David Fuchs speaks to us in a distinctive, affecting voice. He evokes the special, marvelous qualities of the Jewish-American experience by creating characters and conflicts whose idiom and flavor he catches with uncanny precision. This is an exceptional novel about ordinary people. Each of the central characters lives in the same tenemant building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. This single building is a miniature of the teeming, dynamic community of which it is a part. It is inhabited by solitary souls and families. These people are students, idlers, shopkeepers, mothers, hustlers, lovers and husbands. Fuch's vivid, sharply observed prose folds these separate lives into a full-blooded human comedy. The story he tells reveals people living their lives with all the twists and dodges, the puzzles, the contradictions, the idiocies and the wonderful moments. In short, the busines of living, the banquet of life.
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Daniel Fuchs was born in the Lower East Side, Manhattan, but his family migrated to Williamsburg, Brooklyn while Fuchs was an infant.
He wrote three early novels, published by the Vanguard Press —,, and The earlier two of these depicted Jewish life in Williamsburg. The last focused on various ethnic types in Brighton Beach.
A single-volume edition of these was published by Basic Books in 1961 under the title "Three Novels." Subsequent one-volume editions include The Brooklyn Novels, with an introduction by the novelist Jonathan Lethem, published in 2006 by Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher.
Homage to Blenholt concerns a well-meaning tenement schlemiel who hopes to escape poverty via various inventions and get-rich quick schemes. Fuchs also wrote short stories and personal essays, mainly for The New Yorker.
When he was 26, he moved to Los Angeles, California to work on films. Fuchs wrote the screenplay for the crime noir.
He also penned the psychodrama, which was directed by Elia Kazan.
In 1995, Criss Cross was remade as The Underneath by director Steven Soderbergh, with cr given to Fuchs. Fuchs" short Hollywood novel, "West of the Rockies," was published in 1971, and in 1979 appeared a collection of mostly earlier-written short stories, "The Apathetic Bookie Joint." The Golden West: Hollywood Stories, a collection of Fuchs"s fiction and essays about Hollywood, was published in 2005 by Black Sparrow Books. Fuchs died in Los Los Angeles
Irving Howe wrote of Fuchs for Commentary Magazine in 1948 that "he showed such a rich gift for fictional portraiture of Jewish life in the American city that, given sustained work and growth of mind, he might have written its still-uncreated comedie humaine.
After reading Fuchs" work one wonders: What was the source of his talent and the cause of his silence, and, perhaps more important, what was the relationship between his talent and his silence?" John Updike has been quoted as saying, "Nobody else writes like Daniel Fuchs. I think of him as a natural—a poet who never had to strain after a poetic effect, a magician who made magic look almost too easy.".
( Book jacket/back: In this beloved novel of immigrant li...)
(These three novels of the 1930s constitute an American cl...)