Richard G. Stern
Encyclopedia
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
on February 25, 1928. He attended the University of North Carolina
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in 1947. After a year working in Indiana, Florida and New York City, he went to Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
where he received an MA in English Literature.
In 1949, he taught as a Fulbright Scholar in Versailles, France. From 1950-51 he was an assistant professor and taught at Heidelberg University. From 1952-54, he was a member of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and received a PhD from the University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...
in 1954. After a year teaching at Connecticut College
Connecticut College
Connecticut College is a private liberal arts college located in New London, Connecticut.The college was founded in 1911, as Connecticut College for Women, in response to Wesleyan University closing its doors to women...
in New London, he came to the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
where he taught from 1955-2002. He retired as Helen A Regenstein Professor of English and American Literature in 2004.
During his tenure at the University of Chicago, Stern was allegedly involved in the "suppression" of the "beat edition" of the Chicago Review (winter edition of 1958). At the time The Chicago Review was a student/faculty literary publication published by the University of Chicago. The editor then was Irving Rosenthal. The "beat edition" of the Review was to include excerpts from Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs, and a few Jack Kerouac stories. According to Rosenthal, Stern, along with Joshua Taylor, another faculty member, wanted to suppress the winter issue, being himself "so quick to protect the administration." (For reference to the case of censorship See The Beats, A Literary Reference by Matt Theado, pp. 103, 104, 105, under the chapter titled The Chicago Review and a Case of Censorship.)
Stern's own account of the "so-called suppression" appeared in "How I Think I Got to Think the Way I Think" in The Republic of Letters (to be reprinted in Still on Tap, Stern's forthcoming "orderly miscellany"). It recounts Stern's successful attempt not only to save the review (the university chancellor, Kimpton, wished to stop funding it) but to keep the following issue from dropping any of the pieces (of Naked Lunch and other "beat" works) that had been accepted. Rosenthal and Paul Carroll, the Review's co- editors, founded Big Table, using submissions which Stern and the other student editors claimed belonged to the Review. (Oddly, Stern was invited to and did read at a fund-raiser for Big Table and published what he read in its second issue.) Furthermore, the previous issue of the Review included an excerpt from Naked Lunch along with work by other Beats.
In 1960, Stern published his first novel, Golk, then the novels Europe or Up and Down with Baggish and Schreiber (1961), In Any Case (1962), Stitch (1965), Other Men's Daughters (1973), Natural Shocks (1978), A Father's Words (1986), and Pacific Tremors (2001). There also have been short story collections culminating in his collected stories, Almonds to Zhoof published in 2004, his 21st book. Of this last book, a reviewer in the New Republic, called Stern "the best American author of whom you have never heard." This indeed has been the tag associated with Mr. Stern for the last quarter of a century. "I was a has-been before I'd been a been," was a well-known self-deprecation as was the word of Richard Schickel
Richard Schickel
Richard Warren Schickel is an American author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He is a film critic for Time magazine, having also written for Life magazine and the Los Angeles Times Book Review....
that Mr. Stern "was almost famous for not being famous." Stern published another collection of essays, What is What Was, in 2002. Like his other essay collections, this one demonstrates that his astute observations in fiction are equal to, and derived from, his acute views on news and culture.
In 1985, Stern received the Medal of Merit for the Novel, awarded to a novelist every six years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his many other awards was the Heartland Award for the best work of non-fiction which Stern received for his memoir, Sistermony, published in 1995. Stern has been praised by many of the great writers and critics of the last fifty years, among them Anthony Burgess, Flannery O'Connor, Howard Nemerov, Thomas Berger, Hugh Kenner, Sven Birkerts, and Richard Ellmann, as well as his close friends Tom Rogers, Saul Bellow, Donald Justice, and Philip Roth (see Stern's forthcoming essay "Glimpse, Encounter, Acquaintance, Friendship" in Sewanee Review, Winter 2009). He has also enjoyed literary acquaintances and friendships with such figures as Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Lillian Hellman, and Jorge Luius Borges. Stern's former students at the University of Chicago include such distinguished writers as Douglas Unger, Robert Coover, Austin Wright, Campbell McGrath, Peter LaSalle, and Alane Rollings, as well as the well-known journalists Seymour Hersh, David Brooks, and Mike Taibbi.
At 80, Stern continues to write, and his books remain in print through Northwestern University Press and University of Chicago Press. Since 2006, he has maintained a blog with The New Republic which has attracted a wide and appreciative audience.
The most recent book about Stern and his work was published in 2001: The Writings of Richard Stern: The Education of an Intellectual Everyman, by David Garrett Izzo (McFarland Publishing). See also James Schiffer's study, Richard Stern, published by Twayne/Macmillan in 1993.