Sam Halpert

Background

Sam was born in 1920.

Career

Sam worked as the writer and a typesetter. He also had military service: Army Air Force, where he served as a B-17 navigator. He also served in Europe in World War II.

He published in 1991 ... When We Talk about Raymond Carver, a book of reminiscences by Carver’s lovers, close friends, and associates. Russell Banks, discussing ...When We Talk about Raymond Carver in the Atlantic, called the book “an old-fashioned Irish kind of wake, in which dear friends and family members gather and recollect and tell stories and lies, make their confessions and renew loyalties, offer toasts, and sing songs of praise and lamentation, one hard upon another.” When Carver died at the age of fifty in 1988, “it was widely agreed then that he had already made a major contribution to American literature,” wrote Banks.

Halpert also produced an expanded edition of... When We Talk about Raymond Carver, Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography (1995). Library Journal contributor Peter Dollard judged Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography to be “highly readable” as well as “an engrossing, touching, and insightful remembrance of Carver.”

Halpert’s World War II novel A Real Good War (1998) chronicles the wartime experiences of the young American crew members of a bomber plane. A Kirkus Reviews contributor stated that the novel’s battle scenes have “a fresh and bracing realism,” and called the book “an inspiring debut: nostalgic, ironic, and respectful of a harrowing moment in America’s history.”

Achievements

• Sam Halpert is primarily known as the author and editor of an oral biography of the highly regarded American writer Raymond Carver. He has also written an autobiographical novel about World War II - A Real Good War. Both books have been critically praised.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Real Good War

    (Historic fiction, this novel follows a B-17 crew through ...)

    1997
  • Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography 1995
  • When We Talk About Raymond Carver 1991

Interests

• reading

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 181