Emerson, Gloria 1930-

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EMERSON, Gloria 1930-

PERSONAL: Born 1930.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Random House, 145 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

CAREER: Author of nonfiction and fiction. New York Times, New York, NY, foreign correspondent, 1965-72.

AWARDS, HONORS: George Polk Award for Excellence in Reporting, 1971; National Book Award for Nonfiction, 1978, for Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from a Long War; inducted into New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame, 1982; Princeton University Council of Humanities Ferris fellow.

WRITINGS:

Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from a Long War, Random House (New York, NY), 1976.

Some American Men, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1985.

(Author of foreword) Adam D. Weinberg, On the Line:The New Color Photojournalism, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), 1986.

(With Mitchell Goodman) The End of It, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux (New York, NY), 1989.

Gaza: A Year in the Intifada: A Personal Account from an Occupied Land, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 1990.

Loving Graham Greene: A Novel, Random House (New York, NY), 2000.

(Author of foreword) Frank Snepp, Decent Interval:An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End, Told by the CIA's Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), 2002.

(Author of introduction) War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam, edited by Tad Bartimus, Random House (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism, 1959-1969, Volume 1, Library of America (New York, NY), 1998. Contributor to periodicals, including Esquire, Harper's, New Times, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Saturday Review, Vanity Fair, and Vogue.

Emerson's collection of Vietnam War photographs is housed at University Archives and Special Collections, University of Massachusetts, Boston.

SIDELIGHTS: Gloria Emerson is best known for her work as a New York Times correspondent in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Since then she has written extensively on the subject, expressing her inability to get over the horrors she witnessed while traveling in southeast Asia alongside U.S. troops.

Emerson's book Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from a Long War is a compilation of four years' of interviews with Vietnam veterans and their families, antiwar activists, and Vietnamese soldiers. The book also gives a personal account of being in Vietnam during wartime. "For fifteen years it was a country that haunted and held me. It still does; I do not expect to recover," explains Emerson in the book. "Considering its wide range of subject matter, it is striking that one of the hallmarks of Winners and Losers is that it hardly ever directly confronts the war—instead we experience the war through its effects on individuals," remarked Maria S. Bonn in Papers on Language and Literature. "By only giving us the results of violence and not the violence itself, she attempts to cut herself off from carrying on the cycle of converting suffering into spectacle," added Bonn. Winners and Losers won the 1978 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Some American Men, Emerson's second book, highlights the lives of a cross section of men to comment on masculinity, society, and war. In the book, Emerson shares details of interviews with a range of men, including a college football player, an entrepreneur, a teacher, a security guard, a doctor, a mechanic, a student in a rock band, a correspondent, a priest, and a food-plant worker. The volume's breadth caused several critics to question the author's overall purpose. "Emerson's book is in disparate chunks, seemingly drawn from unrelated projects, few of them suited to the arguments surrounding them," observed Amy E. Schwartz in a review for Washington Monthly. "Anecdotes can resonate only if connected to some broader evidence of the phenomenon they purport to illustrate. The evidence is missing from Emerson's book as a whole," added Schwartz. Some American Men was also criticized for not representing all U.S. males. "Emerson's men tend to be upper-middle-class whites (the principal black interviewee is of Caribbean descent) and are, apparently, all heterosexual," remarked Frank Rich in a review for the New Republic. However, Rich explained that while Emerson's work may not have merit as a study on men, "it still has merit as a book. It's as a portrait of one American journalist—one who cannot and will not recover from the war—that Emerson's enterprise achieves flashes of disturbing power."

Emerson's debut novel, Loving Graham Greene, tells the story of Molly Benson, an obsessed fan of writer Graham Greene. Benson has corresponded with Greene since a chance meeting in a restaurant, and in the novel's preface Emerson explains that Greene's correspondences included in the novel are actual letters written to "an American friend." The book begins with Greene's death in 1991, and Molly's desire to do something good in his honor. She decides to travel to Algeria, a country then engaged in a civil war, and give money to Algerian writers and journalists to help protect them from fundamentalist hit squads. Throughout the book, Molly's naiveté and desire to help people drive her character through perilous situations.

Critical reaction to Emerson's novel was mixed. Patrick Sullivan in Library Journal called the book "an ambitious but flawed novel" and noted that "Molly is the novel's main weakness." In a review of Loving Graham Greene for VVA Veteran, William F. Crandall expressed delight with Emerson's book, noting that the author's "writing skills turn clever conceit into a brilliant novel" and adding that "the determined Molly Benson and her companions are richly drawn characters." Crandall described the book as a "funny, literate thriller" that "is a tribute to the power of the word to inspire action in the face of despair."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Emerson, Gloria, Winners and Losers: Battles,Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from a Long War, Random House (New York, NY), 1976.

PERIODICALS

Book, November, 2000, Robert Allen Papinchak, review of Loving Graham Greene, p. 76.

Library Journal, August, 2000, Patrick Sullivan, review of Loving Graham Greene, p. 154.

New Republic, December 16, 1985, Frank Rich, review of Some American Men, pp. 36-38.

New York Review of Books, January 20, 1977, Garry Wills, "Imprisoned in the Sixties."

New York Times Book Review, October 15, 2000, William Boyd, "The Do-Gooder."

Papers on Language & Literature, winter, 1993, Maria S. Bonn, "The Lust of the Eye: Michael Herr, Gloria Emerson, and the Art of Observation," pp. 28-48.

People, January 20, 1986, Ralph Novak, review of Some American Men, pp. 18-19.

Psychology Today, April, 1986, Michael S. Kimmel, "Men in Particular," p. 80.

Publishers Weekly, March 29, 1991, review of Gaza:A Year in the Intifada, p. 82; August 7, 2000, review of Loving Graham Greene, p. 72.

San Francisco Chronicle, February 11, 2001, Martin Rubin, review of Loving Graham Greene.

Visual Sociology Review, 1990, review of LovingGraham Greene, pp. 22-29.

VVA Veteran, August-September 2001, William F. Crandell, review of Loving Graham Greene.

Washington Monthly, February, 1986, Amy E. Schwartz, review of Some American Men, pp. 55-56.