Has an Author Changed Your Life?
(Edith Wharton Changed Mine)
Wharton blew me away in college when I read The House of Mirth, and I had the good fortune in an MFA program not long after to take a Wharton seminar with the biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff, author of the ground-breaking book The Feast of Words. I attended Wharton conferences in Lenox, Massachusetts, the seat of her beautiful home The Mount; in Brooklyn; and in Paris. Years later in Florence I was a Wharton conference keynoter with my book Rosedale in Love, an alternate history of The House of Mirth.
The link to my recent Edith Wharton Review contribution is below, and here’s the abstract:
In this personal essay, the author recounts five decades of reading, teaching, and being inspired by Edith Wharton’s life and work, highlighting meetings with many noted Wharton scholars in the United States and abroad, and recounting the genesis of three of his twenty-seven books that deal with Wharton. Those works are a study of shame in her life and fiction, Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Shame; an acclaimed comic mystery, The Edith Wharton Murders; and a revisioning of her classic novel The House of Mirth from the point of view of Simon Rosedale and his family, Rosedale in Love.
Link: https://writewithoutborders.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/EWR_40_1-2_10_Raphael.pdf
So—has an author writer changed your life? Who was it and how?
Yes, Raymond Carver changed my life. I heard him read from Cathedral at a literary festival. It was gritty realism for me from that day forward. (I've since moved away from it.)