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literary magazine, dropped out immediately and hitchhiked to New York, where he got a job and began living and writing in the
Village, subsequently producing a remarkable series of plays. Another classmate left in June, heading for San Francisco...". Anastas himself stayed in college, but was powerfully influenced to become a writer and critic. "ad it not been for hearing John Aldridge speak in 1956, and having then discovered his books, I would not be writing today."
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evisceration of those who, in his view, failed to measure up. As he wrote memorably in 1951, the new writers "have learned that after the innovators come the specialists and after the specialists the imitators and that after a movement has spent itself there can only come the incestuous, the archaeologists, and the ghouls."
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noted
Aldridge's hostile judgments on the novelists of World War II. Aldridge himself said, "Perhaps for reasons of innate perverseness, I seem always to have functioned best in an adversary position … . This has been especially true of my evaluations of various writers whose reputations seemed to
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in the mid-1950s. According to
Anastas, who was then an 18-year-old student, "I left Aldridge's talk reeling." Aldridge had advised young writers in the audience to depart the academy in order to gain life experience and artistic authenticity. "A friend, with whom I had published in the college
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writing of the 1920s as his lofty standard, Aldridge wrote of the creative dilemmas faced by those writers who arrived on the literary scene a generation later, yet still hoped to create fresh depictions of their experience. Reviewing new work as it appeared, he could be merciless in his
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and sharply differentiated from the specialized academic criticism that dominated his era, was what he called "the long, analytical essay-review". Gore Vidal noted
Aldridge was mostly concerned with "values" in Aldridge's critical book
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me to have become inordinately enlarged and upon whom I saw it as my sacred duty to perform a deflating operation." No one came in for more deflation than
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Critiques and Essays on Modern
Fiction, 1920–1951; representing the achievement of modern American and British critics; with a foreword by
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Aldridge's impact is still felt. Peter
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Aldridge wrote assessments of postwar
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Devil in the Fire; retrospective essays on
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461:"A Walker in the City: Writings by Peter Anastas: John W. Aldridge, 1924-2007"
138:, literary critic, teacher and scholar. He was a professor of English at the
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Talents and
Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-line Fiction.
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After the Lost
Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars.
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In Search of Heresy; American Literature in an Age of Conformity.
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In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity
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Aldridge's work includes one of the first favorable notices of
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Time to Murder and Create: the Contemporary Novel in Crisis.
429:"William Styron and the Derivative Imagination", in
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202:and several essays on the creative strengths of
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134:(September 26, 1922 – February 7, 2007) was an
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150:Special Ambassador to Germany.
530:University of Michigan faculty
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525:Writers from Sioux City, Iowa
465:www.peteranastas.blogspot.com
450:, June 2007, lxviii:2, p. 1.
258:In the Country of the Young.
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540:Middlebury College alumni
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406:After the Lost Generation
180:After the Lost Generation
165:After the Lost Generation
103:After the Lost Generation
396:(Harper, 1972), p. xvii.
448:The Hopwood Newsletter
140:University of Michigan
431:The Devil in the Fire
418:The Devil in the Fire
408:. McGraw-Hill, 1951.
394:The Devil in the Fire
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315:on February 21, 2007
34:John Watson Aldridge
467:. January 31, 2008
200:Something Happened
172:American modernist
154:Literary influence
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58:(2007-02-07)
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319:November 3,
84:(1940–1943)
499:Categories
442:quoted by
289:References
178:Reviewing
70:Occupation
46:Sioux City
39:1922-09-26
471:March 22,
198:'s novel
420:, p. xv.
375:cite web
329:cite web
365:June 7,
284:(1992)
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170:Using
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122:Spouse
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473:2011
381:link
367:2011
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321:2009
148:USIA
53:Died
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