Chandler Brossard

His early works have been described as “landmarks of the postwar American novel.” Since 2000, three of his novels have been reprinted.

He died of cancer in New York in August 1993. Brossard’s papers are held by Syracuse University.

A special 1987 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, guest edited by Steven Moore, was devoted to a critical examination of his work. In interviews with Moore in 1985, Brossard said of his work:

Brossard later married Maria Huffman. Their daughter Genève Brossard, born in 1977, later became an arts teacher and professional boxer. He and Maria divorced in the late 1980s.

After 1973, Brossard’s fiction was published only by small presses, such as Cherry Valley, Realities Library, and Redbeck Press. Dalkey Archive Press published his final full-length novel, As the Wolf Howls at The Door, in 1992.

In 1971 Anatole Broyard, the book reviewer of The New York Times, wrote a scathing review of Wake Up. We’re Almost There, saying of it: “Here’s a book so transcendentally 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. The two men, former friends in the 1940s, had a continuing conflict.

His shorter fiction from 1971 to 1991 was collected and published posthumously by Sun Dog Press under the title Over the Rainbow? Hardly: Collected Short Seizures (2005). Brossard had chosen the title shortly before his death. The Greek-British writer Alexis Lykiard described Who Walk In Darkness (1952), The Bold Saboteurs (1953) and The Double View (1960) as “landmarks of the postwar American novel”. Since 2000, Brossard’s first two novels have been reprinted with new introductions by Steven Moore (see below).

From 1969 to 1971, Brossard was a professor at the newly founded Old Westbury College on Long Island. He later held teaching appointments as a visiting professor, writer-in-residence, or lecturer at other universities both in the United States and abroad, including the University of Birmingham in England, The New School for Social Research in New York, Schiller College in Paris, the University of California at Riverside, and San Diego State University.

Brossard wrote four plays, all produced in St. Louis, Missouri, in the 1960s. He published three novels under the pseudonym Daniel Harper (see below).

During his career, Brossard worked for several magazines: he went on to become a senior editor for Time magazine, managing editor at Coronet, executive editor for The American Mercury, and senior editor for Look magazine (1956–67). He also wrote criticism for The Nation, Commentary, and The Guardian.

Brossard’s first novel, Who Walk in Darkness (1952), portrayed the bohemian life of the late 1940s Greenwich Village; it was first published by Gallimard in France. It is sometimes called the first beat novel. Through it, Brossard became associated with early Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but he believed that he was on a different path. He said that reviewers who characterized Who Walk in Darkness as a beat novel

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has attributed the conflict to an earlier falling out over Brossard’s “unflattering portrayal” of Broyard as the hipster character Henry Porter in his 1952 novel. Brossard described Porter as a Negro “passing” for white. Broyard was a mixed-race Creole who lived as white in New York. Having seen the galleys, he forced Brossard to change the description of Porter before the novel was published in the US.

More recently, the novel has been characterized as existential, closer to works such as Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Albert Camus’ L’Étranger (1942).

Chandler Brossard (July 18, 1922 – August 29, 1993) was an American novelist, writer, editor, and teacher. He wrote or edited a total of 17 books. With a challenging style and outsider characters, Brossard had limited critical success in the United States. His novels were more appreciated in France and Great Britain.