Publisher's Synopsis
Born in North Dakota of English- and French-Canadian parents, educated in schools from Florida to Saskatchewan and Montreal, married to a Bengali-born writer, resident at various times of Canada, the United States, and India, Clark Blaise ideally fulfills the role of the outsider or, in the title words of his latest book, the "resident alien." His fiction, like his life, is characterized by these kinds of dualities and overlappings, and his six works to date reflect a versatility with form that renders the distinction between short story, novel, and autobiography quite meaningless. The Clark Blaise Papers documents the growth of this internationally acclaimed writer, and catalogues source material for the student of contemporary Canadian fiction. A significant addition to the Canadian Archival Inventory Series, the volume also includes a scholarly and perceptive biocritical essay by Dr. Catherine Ross of the University of Western Ontario.Manuscript Collection 14 (which incorporates both accessions, the first having been acquired by the University of Calgary in 1980, and the second in 1987) documents Clark Blaise's literary activity between 1960 and 1986. It ranges from his early work at Harvard University, where he was a student of Bernard Malamud, and his early years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, to his first published short story, The Little Orphan (1961), through many other short stories, published and unpublished, to three short story collections, A North American Education (1973), Tribal Justice (1974), and Resident Alien (1986), two published novels, the award-winning Lunar Attractions (1979) and Lusts (1983), and a travel journal, Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), co-written with Bharati Mukherjee. The inventory also lists several film treatments, numerous book reviews, articles, essays and speeches, as well as drafts of two unpublished novels. Research notes, rough holograph notes and drafts in notebooks, typescripts, and computer-generated manuscripts, author's proofs and publisher's galleys are also included, along with lists of almost every periodical and little magazine in which Clark Blaise's writing has appeared. Extensive correspondence between the author and other writers, students, friends, family, agents, editors, publishers and others is part of the archival collection as well.
