Publisher's Synopsis
After World War II, American literature faced extinction. With the sorrowful decline of John O'Hara, the typewriter shortage of 1946, and the advent of television, it was apparent that American writing, so dominant in the first half of the century, was about to fade into a cruel oblivion. But then Neal Pollack manifested himself in the US consciousness as the pre-eminent American writer, a position he has not relinquished except for a brief period in 1972, when the title belonged to Erica Jong. Neal Pollack has published more than 40 books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, literary criticism, and military history. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, the National Book Award (three times), and the Premio Rigoberta Menchu for service to the indigenous peoples of Guatemala. As a journalist, he has written for every major American magazine, some Canadian ones, and a couple of the better British publications as well. He has covered the Cuban revolution, the sexual revolution, and the Republican Revolution of 1994. In Vietnam he took a bullet for his buddy and lived. He has advised and betrayed four presidents, and is a figure unrivalled.;Incredibly, this is the first comprehensive collection of his work ever published, largely because the government is afraid of his ideas. Contained within are excerpts from his most popular novels, such as Leon: A Man of the Streets, and his most significant nonfiction works, including his landmark essay on U.S. foreign policy, "The Decision to Invade New Zealand and How It Wasn't Made." This book is pointed and funny, moving and eloquent, but more importantly, it is a comprehensive chronicle of the world in which we live, have lived, and are yet to live. It is a must-read for every American with access to a computer, and also those who go to public libraries. As he writes this, Neal Pollack hears the eagle's roar from atop Mount Winchester, and it reminds him of Wally Trumbull, his first love, his roommate at Exeter, so cruelly taken away from him in the Phillipines so long ago. He would have gladly worked a job like ordinary men, have passed up those Havana nights in 1957, those road trips with Ginsberg, those Andy Warhol films in which he starred, if he could have just held Wally once more for ten minutes. Five even.;But alas, it is his curse to stumble across this globe alone, taking lesser women for his lovers, until the gods reunite him and Wally in their eternal prep-school bunkbedded bliss. American literature is saved only once a century. Neal Pollack has now saved it two centuries in a row.
