Exley, Frederick

New York. 1975. April 1975. Random House. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0394494407. 275 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by James Spanfeller. keywords: Literature America Drink. FROM THE PUBLISHER - PAGES FROM A COLD ISLAND begins with the death of Edmund Wilson. The news teaches Fred Exley even as he is rereading Wilson's Hecate County to determine its suitability for a writing class he is going to teach at Iowa. The effect of Wilson's death is overwhelming. Thus begins a personal odyssey, an obsessive journey that takes him from his own ‘roots' (his mother's home in Alexandria Bay on the St. Lawrence) to a small hot resort island off Florida and, finally, to the climax of the book at the Iowa Writers' Workshop-an obsessed and sometimes hilarious search, if you will, to find a way to write the very book you are reading. It is an utterly absorbing journey which moreover touches much of the crippled creative life in America. Raunchy, drunken, by turns wildly sexual and close to suicide, Exley memorably evokes a real life by using the most skillful techniques of the born novelist, For Exley is here not merely recording the already fascinating pattern of his days, but literally overwhelms the reader with a bombardment of scenes, insights and unsettling observations, interweaving his own personal and marvelously entertaining sense of the world around him with outrageous encounters with such personalities as Gloria Steinem and Norman Mailer, But the guiding metaphor here, the one strong, steady light in a murky literary landscape, is Edmund Wilson. Exley's search for the essence of this man-and his own personal quest for the guts of this book-is the sane center of a story whose irrepressible energy and candid confession will hold readers absorbed. FREDERICK EXLEY was born in Watertown, New York, and educated at the public schools there, at the John Jay High School in Katonah, New York, and at the University of Southern California from which in June, 1953, he received an A.B. in English. His first book, A FAN'S NOTES, was nominated for a National Book Award; won the William Faulkner Award for ‘the year's most notable first novel'; was awarded the National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award for ‘that work which . is a considerable literary achievement'; received a Rockefeller Foundation grant. inventory #26384 ISBN: 0394494407.