[lit-ideas] Frank Conroy
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 09 Apr 2005 00:56:47 -0400
extract of: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/07/books/07conroy.html
Frank Conroy Dies at 69; Led Noted Writers' Workshop
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: April 7, 2005
Frank Conroy, the author of the classic memoir "Stop-Time" and an
influence on generations of young writers, died yesterday at his home in
Iowa City. He was 69.
The cause was colon cancer, said his wife, Margaret.
Mr. Conroy, who headed the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa
for 18 years, published just five books, a relatively small number for a
writer of his reputation. But one of them was the lucid and evocative
1967 memoir that has been a model for countless young writers - the sort
of book that is passed along like a trade secret.
But Mr. Conroy was a personal model as well, a sympathetic but exacting
teacher who at Iowa helped shape the early careers of writers including
Curtis Sittenfeld, Elizabeth McCracken, Z. Z. Packer, Nathan Englander
and Abraham Verghese. Several of Mr. Conroy's former students have
themselves become teachers in the Conroy mode. "It's a ripple effect,"
said one of them, the novelist Jayne Anne Phillips.
Frank Conroy was born in New York City on Jan. 15, 1936. His father,
Philip, left his wife and two children when Mr. Conroy was a child and
moved in and out of mental institutions. Mr. Conroy grew up with his
mother, Helga, a Danish immigrant, and a stepfather, Guy Trudeau, who
was self-absorbed and full of impractical schemes. Bouncing back and
forth from Florida to New York, the family at times lived from hand to
mouth, and Mr. Conroy's fraught and uncertain childhood and adolescence
is the subject of "Stop-Time." The book is a coming-of-age story about a
young man who, in a sense, brings himself up.
Mr. Conroy attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City and
graduated in 1958 from Haverford College, where he sold his first short
story as a senior. After moving to New York, he became a hanger-on at
Elaine's, the literary watering hole, where, as the writer David
Halberstam recalled, he at first annoyed some of the regulars, who
"wondered who this brash young kid was."
"But then 'Stop-Time' came out," Mr. Halberstam said, "and we all shut
up." Though it sold only modestly at first, "Stop-Time," one of the rare
books to have been blurbed by both Norman Mailer and William Styron,
made its author a literary celebrity.
But 18 years elapsed between the publication of "Stop-Time" and Mr.
Conroy's next book, "Midair," a short-story collection. "People thought
I knew what I was doing when I wrote 'Stop-Time,' but I didn't," Mr.
Conroy said last year. "I knew I was a very good writer, but it had all
been an act of faith."
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