![]() Robert De Niro was a drinking buddy his father, Robert De Niro Sr., an artist, painted Ms. Truman Capote was down the block, Norman Mailer around the corner. With his career launched, the Woiwodes moved to an apartment on Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights. Published in 1969, “What I’m Going to Do, I Think” won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the most notable first novel of the year and was a finalist for the National Book Award. (A second memoir, “A Step from Death” came out in 2008.) When the book was bought by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, he was delighted by the venerable publishing house’s essential grubbiness, its cubicles “packed like a milliner going out of business,” he wrote in his memoir “What I Think I Did” (2000), just like the offices of his beloved, equally grubby New Yorker. His first novel, “What I’m Going to Do, I Think,” was a meditation on love - the story of a young couple’s moral and emotional quest, set in a lodge on a Michigan lake where they have gone for their honeymoon. Maxwell would bring to the lunches they shared on benches in Central Park. Marks Place in the East Village that rented for $9 a week, and on the sandwiches Mr. Woiwode’s lodestar and protector when at 24 he moved to New York, where he lived on beer and candy bars in a room on St. Woiwode, had grown up in a small town in Illinois and had been educated at the state university’s Urbana-Champaign campus. Salinger, Shirley Hazzard and John Updike - the literary lions of postwar America - and who, like Mr. His mentor was William Maxwell, the gentle New Yorker fiction editor who had nurtured John Cheever, J.D. Authors who should have known better mocked him for the delay….įor a decade, he had been teetering on the edge of literary stardom. It undid their marriage for a time, along with their finances and his health. Woiwode more than five years to write the book - though his wife, Carole Woiwode, said it felt like 10 - and the effort nearly broke him. Among the other names on his list were Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and F. In 1982, Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post called “Beyond the Bedroom Wall” one of the 20 best books of the 20th century. Gardner added, “that nothing more moving has been written in years.” ![]() The novelist John Gardner, writing in The New York Times, called it a “brilliant solution” to the aesthetic problems raised by the modernist authors who were then upending traditional structure and their aversion to “plain, grown-up talk about love and death.” For its epic sweep, elegant language and essential themes, he was compared to Dickens, Melville and Tolstoy. Woiwode’s 1975 novel, “Beyond the Bedroom Wall,” a 600-page saga about four generations of a North Dakota farming clan, established his place in American letters. Larry Woiwode, the author of lyrical, expansive novels, short stories, poems and essays, mostly planted in the American West, that explored the power of place, family ties and faith, spiritual and otherwise, died on April 28 in Bismarck, N.D. From a New York Times obit by Penelope Green headlined “Larry Woiwode, Who Wrote of Family, Faith, and Rural Life, Dies at 80”:
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