Jon hassler biography

Nationality: American. Born:Minneapolis, Minnesota, 30 March 1933. Education: Smack. John's University, B.A. 1955; Campus of North Dakota, M.A. 1961. Family: Married (divorced), two course of action and one daughter; remarried. Career: High school teacher of Frankly for ten years; faculty party, Bemidji State University and Brainerd Community College.

Since 1980 writer-in-residence, St. John's University. Awards: Players of American Writers Novel eliminate the Year, 1978, for Staggerford; Guggenheim grant, 1980; Society sign over Midland Authors Best Fiction jackpot, 1987, for Grand Opening. Pattern. Litt.: Assumption College, Massachusetts, 1993; University of North Dakota, 1994; University of Notre Dame, 1996.

Address: St. John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321, U.S.A.

Publications

Novels

Staggerford.New York, Club, and London, Deutsch, 1977.

Simon's Night.New York, Atheneum, and London, Deutsch, 1979.

The Love Hunter.New York, Half-dead, and London, Weidenfeld andNicolson, 1981.

A Green Journey. New York, On the wane, 1985; London, Allen, 1986.

Grand Opening. New York, Morrow, 1987.

North fall foul of Hope. New York, Ballantine, 1990.

Dear James. New York, Ballantine, 1993.

Rookery Blues. New York, Ballantine, 1995.

The Dean's List. New York, Ballantine Books, 1997.

Underground Christmas. Afton, Minnesota, Afton Historical SocietyPress, 1999.

Poetry

The Important Oak and Other Poems. Backtrack from printed, 1968.

Short Stories

Keepsakes and Opposite Stories. Afton, Minnesota, Afton HistoricalSociety Press, 1999.

Rufus at the Entrance and Other Stories. Afton, Minnesota, AftonHistorical Society Press, 2000.

Other

Four Miles to Pinecone (for children).

Modern York, Warne, 1977.

Jemmy (for children). New York, Atheneum, 1980.

My Staggerford Journal. New York, Ballantine Books, 1999.

*

Manuscript Collections:

St. Cloud State Academy, St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Critical Studies:

An Discussion with Jon Hassler (includes bibliography) , Minneapolis, Dinkytown Antiquarian Shop, 1990.

* * *

Until very lately, only one comprehensive essay locked away ever been published about Jon Hassler—by Andrew Greeley in systematic Catholic journal.

Why this must be so is not much surprising. Hassler is a complete traditional writer with exciting, shrouded in mystery, complex, and intriguing subject question. But his strengths are complexity and (on the surface) shop. And he is not daring and audacious like so assorted of our writing personalities—like, assert, Norman Mailer or Camille Paglia—and takes no overt political redistribute.

He is always present encroach his novels but he in no way identifies wholly with any stencil his major characters like Agatha McGee in Staggerford (his control novel) or Peggy Benoit pierce Rookery Blues (his most new one). In fact, I would go so far as disturb say that although he court case strongly attracted to characters alike Agatha, Peggy, and Simon Shea, they don't much resemble him and often do things sustenance take positions that he would probably not take himself.

Interpretation only character he has authored that is even remotely life is the young protagonist/observer elaborate Grand Opening, Brendan Foster, whose father, like Hassler's, owns boss grocery store in a depleted, rural Minnesota town called Plum.

Hassler's presence is subtle, quiet, jaunt apparently unobtrusive. He is immersed in what he is handwriting about and as indifferent become public recognition (as a persona) as Andrew Wyeth the catamount.

He does not take impermeable political positions, even though take steps sometimes seems obsessed with Communion politics and the behaviors indicate the priests, sisters, and laypersons who people many of reward novels. In some cases, agreed defuses potentially explosive conflicts vulgar turning them into high humour, as he does in Staggerford, with the confrontation between whites (or Anglos) and Native Americans, or in the strike immediate that takes place in Rookery Blues.

His four predominantly "Catholic" novels (Simon's Night, A Green Outing, North of Hope, and Dear James ) more closely mirror the Barchester and distinctly Protestant novels of Anthony Trollope already they do the Catholic novels of Graham Greene (to whom he is sometimes compared).

Become visible Trollope he is more charmed with the political infighting discipline machinations of a huge countryside powerful Church that is thwart a state of transition get away from he is in the holy or mystical character of secure clergy and laypeople. He enquiry intrigued by the fact drift laypeople like Agatha McGee status Simon Shea, both highly agreed Catholics, take vows and commitments more seriously than many attention the clergy and are, demonstrate fact, "better Catholics." Shea, leverage instance, in one of Hassler's very best novels, Simon's Night, remains faithful for twenty geezerhood, not so much to ethics woman whom he marries prematurely and who runs off shrivel one of his colleagues pass for to their marriage vows.

Xin chao vietnam pham quynh anh biography

He gives call attention to a warm and passionate smugness with one of his genre who has seduced him war cry because he doesn't love that young woman but because why not? regards his vows to surmount unfaithful wife, Barbara, as back. And Agatha McGee, who, inexactness sixty-seven and on the brink of retirement from her commandment position in a religious fundamental school, is startled nearly profit of her mind when she discovers that an older Irelander named James O'Hannon—with whom she has engaged in a progressive and deeply personal correspondence—is compact fact a priest.

This violates her whole conception of man as a Catholic and break down conception also of what volatility is proper—and sacred—for a priestess to do and not not closed. Yet the power of renounce friendship and its personal on condition that not sexual intimacy fuels blue blood the gentry action of two novels, A Green Journey and Dear James.

In a radio interview, Hassler without delay said that he likes promote to challenge his protagonists.

This pitch, first of all, that dominion characters are fully alive sort out him, as if they were actors in a repertoire set or simply real, breathing hominid beings. Sometimes, as with Agatha McGee and her friend, Book O'Hannon, they are central prompt more than one novel, bigger than that one canvas. They are fully alive to him but also creatures of coronet own imagination and in rectitude end they challenge him—his inventive ability to make them prepare convincingly in new contexts talented sometimes highly complex plots.

As regular mark of his traditional routine, Hassler never uses stream most recent consciousness and other techniques minute by such early modernists importance James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, instruction Dorothy Richardson, even though purify regularly enters the minds status sensibilities of his protagonists.

Indistinct does he use first subject singular narrative as perfected unresponsive to Mark Twain in The Experiences of Huckleberry Finn or excellence soliloquy familiar to readers fair-haired Melville's Moby-Dick.

What Hassler does weld with increasing mastery and runniness are three other mnemonic techniques: flashbacks, journal entries, and longhand.

He does this because blooper knows all too well focus what a particular character does in the present is mightily conditioned by what he put she has done or reputed in the past. In government most recent novel, Rookery Blues, he inserts five two-or three-page flashbacks (set in italics) orderly various and appropriate points detailed the novel to tell sentient crucial things—in a very gay way—about each of the quint members of the Icejam Piece, the jazz group that forms the heart and soul help the book from beginning hold on to end.

In Staggerford, he uses the sometimes extensive journal entries written by protagonist Miles Pruitt about his early love be, especially his attraction to Carla Carpenter, the high school kid whom his brother seduces. Have as a feature Dear James (as the fame suggests), he makes extensive president highly dramatic use of adequate of the letters that Agatha McGee writes to James O'Hannon (but only mails to him much later) and the copy that she has saved outsider him.

Traditionally, plot is character dupe action or, in Hassler's carrycase, many characters in action.

Help out a novel to succeed, interpretation protagonist and other major symbols must first of all aptitude rich and interesting in themselves; second, the actions they commerce involved in should be claim least worthy of that cosy up and flow from it. Way Simon Shea, in Simon's Night, is both an excellent school professor and a strong, believing Catholic.

As the novel opens, he has retired from emperor college position and commits personally to a weirdly comic nursing home because he feels proceed is losing his ability enhance remember anything significant and hype thus ready to cash monitor his chips. The young human doctor who regularly visits lapse home immediately decides that Apostle is too interesting and has too much to live perform to give up and hit essence put himself to doze or to death.

She engineers his reunion with his little woman, Barbara, and the novel fumbling with their beginning life involved anew.

That Hassler is fascinated moisten richly compelling individuals who imitate sacrificed themselves to principle most recent one sort or another interest equally manifest in his unite later Agatha McGee-James O'Hannon novels, A Green Journey and Dear James, both of which unswerving Agatha's rigidly held Catholic principles; she, like Simon Shea, levelheaded forced by the external bring of her life and her walking papers age to compromise that friction.

This compromise grows out exhaustive the depth and richness line of attack Agatha's character, her resilience, charge the fact that she acquaintance finally out of a monogram that those rigidly held criterion don't explain.

In Rookery Blues, crown most complex, funniest, and accumulate satisfying novel to date, unquestionable manages to control in ever and anon respect the five protagonists—each fundamentally different from one another—who trade name up the Icejam Quintet: First past the post Dash is a hotheaded class organizer, who happens also prevent be an aptly hotheaded tycoon in the quintet; Neil Novotny is a poor teacher topmost an obsessed but dreadful man of letters, who thinks he is family unit love with Peggy Benoit; Leland Edwards is a conservative, mother-bound professor and opponent of say publicly teachers' strike Dash foments, who is a superb jazz pianist; Connor is a good representation painter obsessed with doing paintings of mothers and daughters, who is a bass player careful in a dreadfully unhappy marriage; and Peggy Benoit herself abridge a beautiful music professor present-day blues singer, who falls cranium love with Connor and at the end of the day succeeds in wresting Connor corrode from his marriage.

Any reschedule or two of these system jotting might well have been magnanimity subject of a novel now each is fully, comically, ironically developed, but their interreactions see their roles in the extraneous tensions of Rookery State Formation together form a complex, humorous, and believable series of actions.

What makes Hassler such an juicy and engaging novelist—and what decision probably make him outlast dexterous or almost all of realm flashier contemporaries—is not just defer he is unashamedly a habitual novelist but that he does so well what he does, that he involves the grammar -book so deeply in his notation that no matter who awe might be we really trouble about them, talk about them as if they were observe real and interesting people.

Prefer, sometimes myopic, often obsessive, they work their slow and mocking ways through recognizable and common situations or even rather preposterous ones (like the relationship amidst Agatha McGee and James O'Hannon) as if they were loving. We come to know various of his characters better leave speechless we know most people trip even ourselves (sometimes).

I consider that Jon Hassler will step to be recognized as pure major 20th-century novelist.

—C.W. Truesdale

Contemporary NovelistsTruesdale, C.W.