Stanley Elkin

Stanley Elkin (b. May 11, 1930, d. May 31, 1995) profoundly influenced many avant-garde American and European fiction writers through the example he set as a craftsman ferociously dedicated to his art and to his stylistic innovations, through his counsel in university and writers' conference settings, though his radical innovations with the possibilities inherent in language, and through his substantial, varied body of fiction, charting the evolution of American middle-class culture from the Great Depression to the beginning of the 1990s. His novels and novellas are usually organized around the life of a protagonist who is an isolated observer of mainstream American culture, but who seeks integration with that cultural mainstream, or who