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Samuel Beckett's Wake and Other Uncollected ProseAuthor: Edward Dahlberg Criticism and Other Nonfiction September 1989 343 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 Paperback, 0-916583-42-2 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $15.96—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
Edward Dahlberg, one of the last great men of letters, left behind at his death in 1977 dozens of uncollected essays, reviews, stories, and prefaces. Samuel Beckett's Wake gathers all the shorter pieces that were left out of (or written after) his two earlier collections of essays.
The full range of Dahlberg's abilities in shorter forms is displayed here: from skillful reportage to imaginative essays, from proletarian fiction to inspired parody, from travel pieces and personal memoirs to historical studies, along with some of the most cantankerous book reviews ever published.
Intent on "sweeping the dung out of the Augean stables of literature," Dahlberg went through fields of fiction like a devouring flame, ransacking world literature for "the healing word" that would ease "the suffering, ailing mind." Few readers today would affirm Dahlberg's radical vision of the literary canon, perhaps, but few readers will emerge from this ordeal of fire with their former views unsinged by the heat of his moral fervor.
About the Author
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Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977) was a writer born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the illegitimate son of a woman barber and was sent to an orphanage in Cleveland, Ohio, as a boy, where he soon ran away. After studying at the University of California and Columbia University, he joined the expatriate community in Paris in the 1920s. He wrote pioneering proletarian novels in the 1930s (Bottom Dogs, 1929; From Flushing to Calvary, 1932), then faded from notice, reemerging in the 1960s as a prolific writer of bitter social and literary criticism, verse, and a highly regarded autobiography, Because I Was Flesh (1964). He taught at the University of Missouri, Kansas City (1964-77). |
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Praise
"His work is magnificent in its contours, bursting with the pearls that he has cast before the critical swine during a half-century of arduous labor. . . . When we read him we are crushed against the stones of his language; his visions of darkness and doom force their way into us. He is neither more nor less than an artist, as pure and unerring and obsessive as Baudelaire or Cézanne."—Gilbert Sorrentino"Edward Dahlberg . . . possessed a prose style like the charge of a rogue elephant, direct, majestic, thrilling. . . . In his journalism and autobiographies, Dahlberg is especially plain-spoken, refreshingly personal and American, a brother to William Carlos Williams. The essays gathered here show Dahlberg as a lover of the classics, a defender of living writers against the dead, a memoirist of the great modernists."—Washingon Post Book World
"Dahlberg's work continues to be worth saving. . . . This collection . . . is a credit to editor Steven Moore and the Dalkey Archive Press. . . . A sumptuous buffet for the reader."—Washington Times
"The most salient quality of Dahlberg's criticism is its uncompromising truthfulness of judgment. Here, we find him steadily proceeding against the prevailing grain of literary vogue."—San Francisco Chronicle
"Dahlberg was formidable. If only a few of these pieces were good by his standards, I'd recommend Samuel Beckett's Wake; happily, there are more than a few here."—Columbus Dispatch
"This book is an essential addition to the Dahlberg canon."—Publishers Weekly
"Here . . . we meet the later Dahlberg, who wrote literary essays and reviews from a locus entirely his own. His most colorful, unbridled writing—archaic and controversial, mixing pungent diction with allusions Biblical and classical—savors of
"Dahlberg, whose work may be compared to Kafka's in its intensity of discernment and foreboding, writes of the merciless assault on the spirit in cadenced, occasionally archaic, and consistently splendid English. His language is classic, his metaphor frequently myth, but both language and myth belong to him alone."—Kay Boyle
"Opsimaths and bluenoses have said that our best literature is half trash, if not all, but they have cried out in fear and stupidity; Dahlberg does it in cold blood and with bewildering authority. . . . He is earthy and overcivilized all at once, smooth and bristly by incalculable turns, and wildly melancholy at all times."—Guy Davenport
"Of all contemporary writers in English, Edward Dahlberg best fulfills the gloomy thesis that genius is its own reward. . . . Dahlberg is great."—Anthony Burgess