CONNELL, Evan S(helby) Jr. 1924-

PERSONAL: Born August 17, 1924, in Kansas City, MO; son of Evan Shelby (a surgeon) and Elton (Williamson) Connell. Education: Attended Dartmouth College, 1941-43; University of Kansas, A.B., 1947; graduate study at Stanford University, 1947-48, Columbia University, 1948-49, and San Francisco State College (now University).

ADDRESSES: Home—Fort Marcy 13, 320 Artist Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501. Agent—Don Congdon, 156 Fifth Ave., Suite 625, New York, NY 10010-7002.

CAREER: Writer. Editor, Contact magazine, Sausalito, CA, 1960-65. Military service: U.S. Navy, pilot, 1943-45; served as flight instructor.

AWARDS, HONORS: Eugene F. Saxton fellow, 1953; Guggenheim fellow, 1963; Rockefeller Foundation grant, 1967; California Literature silver medal, 1974, for The Connoisseur; nomination for award for general nonfiction from National Book Critics Circle, 1984, and Los Angeles Times Book Award, 1985, both for Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award, 1987; Lifetime Achievement Award, Lannan Foundation, 2000.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

The Anatomy Lesson, and Other Stories, Viking (New York, NY), 1957.

Mrs. Bridge, Viking, (New York NY), 1959.

The Patriot, Viking (New York NY), 1960.

At the Crossroads: Stories, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1965.

The Diary of a Rapist, Simon & Schuster (New York NY), 1966.

Mr. Bridge, Knopf (New York, NY), 1969.

The Connoisseur, Knopf (New York NY), 1974.

Double Honeymoon, Putnam (New York, NY), 1976.

St. Augustine's Pigeon (stories), North Point Press (Berkeley, CA), 1980.

The Alchymist's Journal, North Point Press (Berkeley, CA), 1991.

The Collected Stories of Evan S. Connell, Counterpoint Press (Washington, DC), 1995.

Deus Lo Volt!: A Chronicle of the Crusades, Counterpoint (Washington, DC), 2000.

OTHER

(Editor) Jerry Stoll, I Am a Lover, Angel Island Publications, 1961.

Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (epic poem), Viking (New York NY), 1963.

(Editor) Woman by Three, Pacific Coast Publishers, 1969.

Points for a Compass Rose (epic poem), Knopf (New York NY), 1973.

A Long Desire (nonfiction), Holt (New York, NY), 1979.

The White Lantern (nonfiction), Holt (New York, NY), 1980.

Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn (nonfiction), North Point Press (Berkeley, CA), 1984.

Mesa Verde (nonfiction), Whitney Museum, 1992.

The Aztec Treasure House: New and Selected Essays, Counterpoint Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Francisco Goya: A Life, Counterpoint (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor of short stories and reviews to periodicals, including New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, New York, San Francisco Chronicle, Carolina Quarterly, Paris Review, and Esquire. Editor of Contact (literary magazine), 1960-65.

ADAPTATIONS: The novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge were adapted as the film Mr. and Mrs. Bridge by Merchant-Ivory Productions in 1990, starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Son of the Morning Star was adapted for American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. (ABC) by Republic Pictures in 1991.

SIDELIGHTS: The works of Evan S. Connell, Jr. range widely in scope and theme, from domestic dramas of the modern middle class to fictitious historical treatises on the Crusades and alchemy. While his fiction has been widely reviewed, and adapted to film, it was his nonfiction work, Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn, that placed him on the best-seller lists. According to William H. Nolte in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Connell "would probably rank today as the most important American novelist if critical reception were the sole criterion for determining the reputation of a writer." Brooks Landon, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1981, explained that "Connell's works have been successful with critics and have enjoyed respectable sales, but his impressive writing still remains one of America's best-kept literary secrets." A Publishers Weekly critic noted that while Connell "never developed a clear literary profile," he is nonetheless "a consummate craftsman who has enjoyed some remarkable successes." In 2000, Connell received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Lannan Foundation. With the exception of Francisco Goya: A Life, which received lackluster praise, Connell has generally drawn high praise among literary critics.

The critical acclaim for Connell's work began with his first collection, The Anatomy Lesson, and Other Stories. At the time of the book's publication in 1957, Anne Chamberlain of the New York Herald Tribune Book Review wrote: "With a virtuoso's dexterity [Connell] explores theme and treatment, subject matter and attack, darting from the precious and the esoteric to almost legendary folk tales, laid in his native Midwest and in distant corners of America. This is a many-faceted writer." New York Times reviewer Siegfried Mandel called him "a craftsman who can evoke, sustain and dignify the 'small' tragedy that is often hidden from view." And William Hogan, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, said that the stories in The Anatomy Lesson are "well-observed, well-worked slices of life that exhibit craftsmanship, discipline and maturity. Connell is obviously a serious writer of promise and I look forward with great expectations to the publication of his first novel."

That first novel, Mrs. Bridge, published in 1959, is probably Connell's best-known work, as well as the one to which his subsequent books are most often compared. In it the author tells the story of India Bridge, an upper-class Midwestern woman, wife of a lawyer, mother of three children, who comes to personify Connell's concept of the idle rich. She is easily confused, she is bored with her leisure-class existence, and she is dominated by materialism and the need to be "socially correct." India Bridge, according to some critics, may be the most fully developed character in any post-World War II American novel. In her New York Herald Tribune Book Review assessment, Chamberlain said that Connell had achieved "a triumph of ironic characterization. In his heroine, who appears at first meeting the acme of mediocrity, he manages to create an interesting, a pathetically comic, a tragically lonely figure. . . . It is sad, somewhat terrifying to reflect upon the numberless Mrs. Bridges trotting befuddledly through this urgent age."

In the decade following the publication of Mrs. Bridge, Connell published two more novels, The Patriot and The Diary of a Rapist, one book-length poem, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel, and a collection of short stories, At the Crossroads. Most of these were generously accepted by reviewers. He then returned to the Bridge family for his fourth novel, Mr. Bridge, which tells the story from the husband's point of view. A Playboy critic called the book "a brilliant dissection of the quintessential small-town WASP—performed under the light of high art, with irony, insight, and a bleak pity." Webster Schott wrote in the Washington Post Book World: "Had Sinclair Lewis possessed compassion equal to his anger, discipline to complement his energy, he might have written Mr. Bridge. Evan Connell looks at his world straight. No artifice. But with full awareness of the quiet comedy, tenderness and tight-lipped waste. This job need not be done again. Mr. Bridge is a tour de force of contemporary American realism, a beautiful work of fiction." Some reviewers felt that the novel fell short of Connell's work in Mrs. Bridge, commenting that the characterization is somewhat weaker in the newer book. However, as John Gross of the New York Review of Books explained: "If Mr. Bridge is a less engaging work than its predecessor, it is chiefly because Walter Bridge himself has little of his wife's pathos. Where she was vulnerable in her innocence, funny and touching in her hapless cultural aspirations, he is rigid, efficient, proud of knowing his own mind. Not an especially likable man; but then Mr. Connell's purpose in writing about him is not to draw up a brief for the defense, but simply to restore a cliché-figure to humanity."

Connell's 1991 novel, The Alchymist's Journal, is a demanding work that features the journal entries of seven sixteenth-century men, all of them attempting alchemy: the transformation of basic metals into gold. Only one of the men is named—Paracelsus, who is based on the actual physician who experimented with new methods of treatment in the 1500s. The other men reflect readily identifiable types, such as a skeptic, a revolutionary, and a philosopher. As with many other Connell works, reviewers of this novel expressed admiration for the author's obvious painstaking research, experimental form, and intellectual daring. Bettina L. Knapp, writing in World Literature Today, praised the "highly cerebral and wisdom-filled work" as a "tour de force." Hudson Review critic William H. Pritchard, while calling the novel "erudite," admitted that "most of the entries were impenetrable to this uninformed sensibility." New York Times Book Review correspondent Sven Birkerts likewise contended that Connell "has here dared the unfashionable—a work that concedes nothing to the reader's appetite for dramatic structure or vivid historical tableaux."

In an interview with Melody Sumner for the San Francisco Review of Books, Connell brushed aside questions about the inaccessibility of The Alchymist's Journal. "I don't write to an audience," he said. "I wanted all seven of the journals to create a unity, but I was trying to avoid repetition. I went over it several times, just to make sure I wasn't using the same words again and again." Birkerts concluded of the novel: "If we are willing to read with sustained attentiveness, facing the otherness and letting the indecipherable elements burn against our demand for clarity, we may at times feel as though we have stepped into a new place. We may get an inkling of what the world felt like some centuries before it assumed its modern contours." Sybil Steinberg, writing in Publishers Weekly, likewise felt that the book "commands thoughtful attention, its surface resplendent with forgotten lore of alchemy, science and love."

In 1995, many of Connell's short stories were collected and published as The Collected Stories of Evan S. Connell. Many of the collection's fifty-six stories were written in the 1950s and 1960s, while most of the remainder were products of the 1990s. All of the stories feature Connell's trademark minimalist prose; many offer wry commentaries on contemporary American life. The character of Koerner, a writer who in some ways resembles Connell, reappears in several of the stories, works that, to quote a Kirkus Reviews critic, "[sparkle] with Connell's learnedness, sharp wit, and spare, concise prose."

If The Alchymist's Journal deals with the Middle Ages in an interior and cerebral manner, Deus Lo Volt!: A Chronicle of the Crusades embraces the panoramic view of the age. A fictitious first-hand account of the European conquest of the Holy Land from 1095 through 1290, the book not only gives a history of the Crusades but also imparts that history from the perspective of a participant—with the enormous differences between the modern and the Medieval mind everywhere incorporated. Calling the novel "a massive, determinedly archaic history of the crusades from the point of view of a French knight," a Publishers Weekly reviewer commended it as "a great feat of historic empathy." In Booklist, Michael Spinella maintained that Connell "researches with the eye of an expert historical scholar and writes with the hand of an expert novelist."

Aside from his works of fiction, Connell's most notable work is Son of the Morning Star, his account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Sioux Indian warriors, led by Sitting Bull, overwhelmed and slaughtered General George Armstrong Custer's band of American troops. A classic story of American history, "Custer's Last Stand" has been the subject of numerous books and articles since the 1880s. But despite the story's familiarity, Connell's account of the battle became a best-seller as well as a critical success. Besides winning a National Book Critics Circle nomination and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in history, Son of the Morning Star sold over 80,000 copies in hardcover, and paperback rights were sold for over 200,000 dollars. The book's success did not surprise Connell. He told the New York Times: "I always thought it was a pretty wild story. I had a feeling that since I found it so intensely interesting, other people would, too."

Research and writing for the book took Connell four years and involved reading dozens of books on the battle, the diaries of soldiers who participated in the campaign, and accounts by the Indians themselves. He visited the battle site in Montana on four occasions. The resulting manuscript was difficult to sell. Holt, publisher of some of his earlier fiction, declined Son of the Morning Star. They wanted Connell to rewrite the book as a straight biography of Custer or as an overview of the Indian Wars. Connell refused. Eventually North Point Press, a relatively small publisher in California, accepted the book as it was written.

Critical reception to Son of the Morning Star was enthusiastic. Ralph E. Sipper of the Los Angeles Times called it "a monumental study of the philosophical and cultural differences between red and white men that instigated so much mutual animosity and destruction. . . . In a masterly display of literary structure, Connell has drawn from hundreds of pertinent historical accounts and created the modern equivalent of a biblical work of witness." Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Page Stegner stated that "Connell's narrative of the life and times of General Custer becomes a narrative of the conflict between two cultures, and the battle Custer fought at the Little Bighorn [becomes] a metaphor for all the self-righteous hypocrisy that characterizes Indian-white negotiations to this day." Kenneth Turan, in Time, concluded that Son of the Morning Star is "a new American classic."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 2, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 4, 1975, Volume 6, 1976, Volume 45, 1987.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 2: American Novelists since World War II, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1978.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1981, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1982.

PERIODICALS

Art in America, April, 2004, Janis Tomlinson, "Reimagining Goya," pp. 33-34.

Atlantic, February, 2002, review of The Aztec Treasure House: New and Selected Essays, pp. 102-103.

Best Sellers, April 15, 1969; June 15, 1973.

Bloomsbury Review, June, 1991.

Booklist, January 1, 2000, Michael Spinella, review of Deus Lo Volt!: A Chronicle of the Crusades, p. 833; February 1, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Francisco Goya: A Life, p. 941.

Boston Review, June, 1991.

Catholic World, March, 1959.

Christian Science Monitor, May 22, 1969.

Commentary, March, 1985.

Commonweal, February 13, 1959; August 23, 1963.

Detroit News, March 10, 1985.

Harper's, January, 1974.

Hudson Review, summer, 1986; autumn, 1991, William H. Pritchard, review of The Alchymist's Journal, p. 507.

Interview, November, 1990.

Kenyon Review, September, 1966.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1957; July 15, 1960; August 15, 1995, review of The Collected Stories of Evan S. Connell, p. 1126; December 1, 2003, review of Francisco Goya: A Life, p. 1388; July 1, 2004, "Anniversaries . . . Battle of Little Bighorn."

Library Journal, April 15, 1957; January 1, 1959; September 1, 1960; March 15, 1973; August, 1974; April 15, 1991; November 1, 1991; October 1, 1995, p. 122; March 1, 2000, David Keymer, review of Deus Lo Volt!, p. 123; November 15, 2003, Nathan Ward, review of Francisco Goya, p. 60.

Life, April 25, 1969.

Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1980; October 3, 1984, Ralph E. Sipper; review of Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 3, 1986; April 19, 1987; July 14, 1991.

Nation, June 15, 1963; June 30, 1969.

National Review, February 28, 1975; August 9, 1985.

New Mexico Quarterly, summer, 1966.

New Republic, October 14, 1957; June 7, 1969; October 22, 1990.

New Statesman, February 13, 1960.

Newsweek, May 12, 1969; February 4, 1991.

New Yorker, October 14, 1974; June 3, 1985; July 1, 1991.

New York Herald Tribune Book Review, May 26, 1957, Anne Chamberlain, review of The Anatomy Lesson, and Other Stories; January 18, 1959, Anne Chamberlain, review of Mrs. Bridge; September 25, 1960; May 26, 1963.

New York Review, April 24, 1969.

New York Review of Books, June 23, 1966; May 17, 1973, John Gross, review of Mr. Bridge; November 28, 1974.

New York Times, May 19, 1957, Siegfried Mandel, review of The Anatomy Lesson, and Other Stories; February 1, 1959; April 23, 1969; February 13, 1985; February 18, 1990; May 13, 1990.

New York Times Book Review, February 1, 1959; September 25, 1960; April 20, 1969; April 29, 1973; September 1, 1974; May 23, 1976; June 24, 1979; July 20, 1980; December 7, 1980; March 29, 1981; May 30, 1982; January 20, 1985, Page Stegner, review of Son of the Morning Star; April 30, 1989; May 12, 1991, Sven Birkerts, "A World Ripe with Magic"; September 13, 1992, p. 40.

People, December 10, 1990.

Playboy, June, 1969, review of Mr. Bridge.

Publishers Weekly, November 20, 1981, Patricia Holt, interview with Evan S. Connell, p. 12; February 22, 1991, Sybil Steinberg, review of The Alchymist's Journal, p. 208; August 21, 1995, review of The Collected Stories of Evan S. Connell, p. 47; February 21, 2000, review of Deus Lo Volt!, p. 61; October 2, 2000, "Nine Writers Win Lannan Awards," p. 12; July 2, 2001, review of The Aztec Treasure House, p. 59; December 1, 2003, review of Francisco Goya, p. 50.

San Francisco Chronicle, May 28, 1957, William Hogan, review of The Anatomy Lesson, and Other Stories; January 19, 1959; September 19, 1960.

San Francisco Review of Books, February, 1991, Melody Sumner, interview with Evan S. Connell, p. 26.

Saturday Review, May 18, 1957; January 31, 1959; September 24, 1960; July 17, 1965; May 3, 1969; April 17, 1976.

Time, May 27, 1957; January 19, 1959; June 20, 1969; September 2, 1974; June 21, 1976; November 5, 1984, Kenneth Turan, review of Son of the Morning Star.

Times Literary Supplement, July 29, 1983; August 18, 2000, Emily Wilson, review of Dues Lo Volt!, p. 24.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 5, 1981; October 14, 1984.

Village Voice, June 18, 1991.

Virginia Quarterly Review, autumn, 1965; summer, 1969; spring, 1991; winter, 1992, p. 23.

Voice Literary Supplement, March, 1985; November, 1991.

Washington Post, July 17, 1979; November 11, 1981.

Washington Post Book World, April 20, 1969, Webster Schott, review of Mr. Bridge; May 27, 1973; September 1, 1974; July 13, 1980; March 15, 1981; November 18, 1984; September 22, 1985; October 27, 1985; May 3, 1987; September 4, 1988; May 7, 1989; May 19, 1991.

Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, summer, 1967.

World Literature Today, summer, 1992, Bettina L. Knapp, review of The Alchymist's Journal, p. 526.

Yale Review, winter, 1985.

ONLINE

Ploughshares Online,http://www.pshares.org/ (August 2, 2004), Gerald Shapiro, "Evan S. Connell: A Profile."

Salon.com,http://www.salon.com/ (July 18, 2000), Greg Bottoms, "Evan S. Connell."*