This Week in Literary History: Nov. 2-8
Recognizing the birthdays of Colson Whitehead and Michael Cunningham
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Colson Whitehead’s Always Had Zombies On the Brain
It was another night in front of the TV. This time "20/20" was on, revealing its findings on defective escalators. Colson Whitehead had just read through a pile of detective novels, so his mind was inclined to play with the mysteries of an escalator inspector. Escalators became elevators, and one night in 1996 became nine months of Whitehead writing his first acclaimed novel, "The Intuitionist."
"I was an incredibly strange creature the year I wrote my first novel," Whitehead said in an interview for TIME magazine earlier this year. "The premise seemed completely sane to me, so why did other humans look at me as if I were wearing a rubber monster suit or a bloody hockey mask?"
The story involves rival elevator inspectors pursuing a 'perfect' elevator to deliver its passengers into the future. Whitehead used the mechanical nature of elevators to demonstrate how race and capitalism are interconnected.
Whitehead had previously taken on "a similarly ludicrous-sounding premise," but publishers at the time rejected his abstractness.
"Now here I was doing it again. Like an imbecile," Whitehead said. "But I had no choice. I kept working, and if that meant departing from the realm of normal people to enter the psychotronic, so be it."
After all, the realm of vengeful amphibians, sapphic vampires, and ill-considered head transplants felt familiar to him. In fifth grade, his older sister sparked his interest in horror fiction when she gave him Stephen King's Night Shift. By the sixth grade, he started reading Marvel Comics.
"My brother and I would go to the video store every Friday and rent five VHS movies like 'The Driller Killer,' 'Last House on the Left,' 'Invasion of the Crab Men,'" Whitehead told LitHub editor, John Freeman. They would then take out Oscar Mayer baloney from the fridge, roll it into cigarette-sized payloads, "and then we'd just watch these terrible horror movies."
One movie, in particular, stuck out. Whitehead started getting zombie nightmares after watching "Dawn of the Dead" in 1979.
"For decades, depending on what was going on in my life at the time, I was pursued by fast zombies or slow zombies," Whitehead said. "I was alone or with a group. I got away or didn't."
Zombies continued to override Whitehead's sleep until he crafted his first horror fiction novel, Zone One, in 2011. "I tried to capture this elemental terror, of the familiar turned homicidal," Whitehead said. "[Zombies] look the same, but now they want to destroy you, to consume you. And you have to keep running."
Growing up, Whitehead fixated on the idea of monsters as people who had stopped pretending. Yet after digesting enough psychotronic content, he concluded, "An artist is a monster that thinks it is human."
Whitehead made his literary name with intelligent, high-concept novels across a range of genres: noir (The Intuitionist), a zombie thriller (Zone One), a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age account (Sag Harbor), historical fiction (The Underground Railroad), and a psychological growth account, known as a bildungsroman (The Nickle Boys).
Both The Underground Railroad and The Nickle Boys received universal praise, winning a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. A limited TV series based on The Underground Railroad, and directed by Barry Jenkins, is set to premiere as a limited TV series on Amazon Video.
Colson Whitehead
Born on Nov. 6, 1969, in New York City.
Virginia Woolf Turned This Skateboarding Youth Into an Author
While it's doubtful that Virginia Woolf wrote books like Mrs Dalloway as an inspiration for teenage boys living in California in the 1960s, she somehow managed to do just that to a young Michael Cunningham.
Cunningham was born in Cincinnati in 1952 but spent his childhood in La Canada, Calif. It was as a fifteen-year-old that Cunningham first picked up Woolf's timeless novel, at the behest of a girl he was trying to impress, and with that, his life changed forever.
“I hoped, for strictly amorous purposes, to appear more literate than I was,” Cunningham, who is gay, wrote in an essay for The Guardian.
Woolf's work was so impactful to the young Cunningham that it effectively made a writer out of him, a boy who did not have much interest in writing or reading at that age.
"I wasn't bookish at all growing up, more skateboard than literary," Cunningham said. However, there was something about Woolf's writing that affected him.
"I thought, wow, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar,” Cunningham wrote in his Guardian essay. “By which I meant she walked a line between chaos and order, she riffed, and just when it seemed that a sentence was veering off into randomness, she brought it back and united it with the melody."
With his breakthrough novel The Hours, published in 1998, Cunningham dove into his relationship with Mrs Dalloway. Cunningham's story focuses on three women of three different generations who are all affected by their relationships with, you guessed it, Mrs Dalloway. One of the women is Virginia Woolf herself.
The Hours, the title a reference to Woolf's working title for Mrs Dalloway, acts both as a recasting and modernization of Woolf's classic novel. It managed to turn many heads in the literary world and netted Cunningham a Pulitzer Prize in 1999. A successful film adaptation of the book came out in 2002.
Adapting an existing book is difficult territory, especially when it's one as revered as Mrs Dalloway. Cunningham noted that he started the task with a form of cautious reverence.
"I approached the idea with appropriate nervousness," Cunningham wrote. "For one thing, if one stands that close to a genius, one is likely to look even tinier than one actually is."
The result was one that captured many modern readers' hearts, much like how Mrs Dalloway enraptured a teenage Cunning. Today, many regard The Hours as a modern classic.
Cunningham's intergenerational working relationship with Woolf seems almost completely improbable, and more than a little comical, when viewed for its bare facts: an otherwise artistically-disinclined Californian youth finding his spiritual kinswoman in the pages of a 1920's novel. And yet it is, if anything, a testament to the power of Woolf's work, to which we should also be thankful for, at the very least, convincing Michael Cunningham to follow in her footsteps.
Michael Cunningham is still working today, putting out novels and short stories. His most recent book is The Snow Queen, published in 2014. Cunningham currently teaches at Yale University, where he is a senior lecturer in creative writing.
Michael Cunningham
Born on Nov. 6, 1952, in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Sources
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Colson Whitehead
“A Psychotronic Childhood. Learning from B-movies.” Colson Whitehead. The New Yorker. May 28, 2012.
“Colson Whitehead Interview: I Have to Know the Destination.” Louisiana Channel. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Jan. 3, 2018.
“'I Carry It Within Me.' Novelist Colson Whitehead Reminds Us How America's Racist History Lives On.” Mitchell S. Jackson. TIME. June 27, 2019.
“In ‘The Nickel Boys,’ Colson Whitehead Continues to Make a Classic American Genre His Own.” Parul Sehgal. The New York Times. July 11, 2019.
“The Match.” Colson Whitehead. The New Yorker. March 26, 2019. “The Underground Railroad.” Colson Whitehead. Doubleday. 2016.
“Tunnel Vision.” Daniel Zalewski. The New York Times. May 13, 2001.
“What to Write Next.” Colson Whitehead. The New York Times. Oct. 29, 2009.
Michael Cunningham
“Virgina Woolf, my mother, and me.” Michael Cunningham. The Guardian. June 3, 2011.
“The Art of Being Swell.” Allison C. Lewis. The Tech. Feb. 4, 2003.
“Michael Cunningham.” Steven Barclay Agency. Accessed on October 28, 2020.
“Q&A with novelist Michael Cunningham.” Scott King. The Chimes.
“Parallel Lives.” Michael Wood. The New York Times. Nov. 22, 2008.
“Michael Cunningham on the Novel That Would Become Mrs Dalloway.” Michael Cunningham. Lit Hub. July 15, 2019.
Notable Literary Births & Events for Nov. 2-8
Nov. 2
Dale Brown
Jonas Gardell
Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly
Lois McMaster Bujold
Moa Martinson
Odysseas Elytis
Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay
Thomas Mallon
Nov. 3
André Malraux
Ann Scott
Charles Martin
Harry Stephen Keeler
Martin Cruz Smith
William Cullen Bryant
Nov. 4
C. K. Williams
Charles Frazier
Hannah Weiner
Kristin Cast
Kyōka Izumi
Lyndall Gordon
Matthew Tobin Anderson
Sterling North
Nov. 5
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Ida Tarbell
James Elroy Flecker
John Berger
Joyce Maynard
Philippe de Mornay
Sam Shepard
Nov. 6
Chris van Abkoude
Colson Whitehead
Louis Racine
Marco Vassi
Michael Cunningham
Robert Musil
Nov. 7
Albert Camus
Antonio Skármeta
Armstrong Sperry
Guy Gavriel Kay
Margaret Leech
Mary Daheim
William Wharton
Yuyi Morales
Nov. 8
Ben Bova
Bram Stoker
Danielle Valore Evans
Jeffrey Ford
Joshua Ferris
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ken Lamberton
Kevin Young
Margaret Mitchell
Martha Gellhorn
Sarah Fielding
