Brossard, Chandler, 1922-1993

Chandler Brossard was an American novelist, playwright, editor, and teacher. He was born on July 18, 1922 in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and grew up in Washington, D.C. Brossard was chiefly self-educated, having left school at age eleven. He worked as a journalist for the Washington Post before attaining a writing position with The New Yorker at age nineteen, where editor William Shawn encouraged him to write fiction. His first published novel, Who Walk in Darkness (1952), focused on the bohemian life of 1940s Greenwich Village and is sometimes considered the first beat novel, thus earning Brossard an association with early Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg -- an association Brossard neither sought nor desired. Reviewers who characterized Who Walk in Darkness as a beat novel, Brossard said, "totally missed getting the book. They thought it was a realistic novel, which of course it wasn't. The French critics knew better. They perceived it as the first 'new wave' novel, a nightmare presented as flat documentary." ( Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, pp. 43-45.)

Brossard received little critical support for his novels in the United States (though they were well-received abroad, particularly in France). In 1971 Anatole Broyard wrote a scathing review of Wake Up. We're Almost There for the New York Times : "Here's a book so transcendently bad it makes us fear not only for the condition of the novel in this country, but for the country itself." Brossard responded in kind and a small controversy festered between them for a time. Two of Brossard's novels -- The Wrong Turn (Avon, 1954) and The Double View (Dial, 1960) -- were published under the pseudonym "Daniel Harper."

In addition to producing novels, plays and short stories, Brossard worked as an editor for Time magazine (1944), executive editor for American Mercury (1950-1951), and senior editor for Look magazine (1956-1967). He also wrote criticism for The Nation, Commentary, and The Guardian . From 1968-1970, he was a professor at the experimental Old Westbury College on Long Island and subsequently held brief teaching appointments as a visiting professor, writer-in-residence, or lecturer at universities in the United States and abroad, including the University of Birmingham in England, the New School for Social Research in New York, and Schiller College (now Schiller International University) in Paris.

Brossard was married twice and had three daughters. He died in 1993.

From the guide to the Chandler Brossard Papers, 1951-2002, (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)