Abstract
Margaret Mitchell, perhaps the most prominent one-book novelist in American literary history, was once asked by E. B. White what she was doing instead of spending her time writing a sequel to her famous bestseller. “Doing?” she reportedly responded, “It’s a full-time job to be the author of ‘Gone with the Wind.’”1
I’m scared to death of popularity. It has ruined everyone I know.
—John Steinbeck
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Notes
Scott Elledge, E. B. White: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1986[1984]), 324.
Anne Edwards, Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New Haven, CN: Ticknor and Fields, 1983), 212, 216–25, 256, 263, 273–81, 316.
See Doug Underwood, Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008) for a discussion of what is meant by the term journalist–literary figure and an appendix of more than three hundred figures who are described as writers of fiction and/or literary nonfiction who had an important career in journalism and built their literary work on a foundation of journalistic research, reporting, and professional experience.
Jack Fruchtman Jr., Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994), 269, 275–76, 293–331; Linda H. Davis, Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 291–330; Richard O’Connor, Bret Harte; A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 125, 128–33; W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Scribner’s, 1965), 387–88; Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (New York: Penguin, 1989[1988]), xvii, 345; Gerald Clarke, Capote (New York: Ballantine, 1989[1988]), 513; Doug Underwood, Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 173–74, 178, 190–91, 183–84.
Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1972[1935]), 23, 26.
James B. Colvert, Stephen Crane (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 61.
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 2003[1926]), 51.
Richard Dilworth Rust, “Washington Irving,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 250: Antebellum Writers in New York: Second Series (Detroit: Gale, 2002).
Jackson J. Benson, John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography (New York: Penguin, 1990[1984]), 1024; Underwood, Journalism and the Novel, 171.
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, The Front Page: From Theatre to Reality (Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2002), 86.
David R. Johnson, Conrad Richter: a Writer’s Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 305.
Underwood, Chronicling Trauma, 63, 170; Richard O’Connor, Bret Harte; A Biography (Boston: Little Brown, 1966), 124–25, 129, 137, 146; Twain is quoted in Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912), 373.
Andrew Sinclair, Jack: A Biography of Jack London (New York: Pocket, 1977), 109, 123, 210–11.
Mary V. Dearborn, Mailer: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 7–8, 109, 142, 321, 325; Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Washington Square, 2008[1985]), 274, 310, 327–28, 335, 700. Quotations all appear in Manso biography, including from the critic Alfred Kazin, novelists Alan Kapelner and Chandler Brossard, and Rhoda Lazare Wolf.
Richard Lingeman, Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street (New York: Random House, 2002), 163; Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 543.
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© 2013 Mark Canada
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Underwood, D. (2013). Fame and the Fate of Celebrity. In: Canada, M. (eds) Literature and Journalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329301_8
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