Leonard Michaels
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Leonard Michaels (January 2, 1933 - May 10, 2003) was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays. He was born in New York City to Jewish parents; his father was born in Poland. He went to college and earned his B.A. from New York University and went on to acquire an M.A. as well as a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Michigan, before spending most of his adult life in Berkeley, California.
Going Places, his first book of short stories, made his reputation as one of the most brilliant of that era's fiction writers; the stories are urban, funny, and written in a private, hectic diction that gives them a remarkable edge. The follow-up, coming six years later (Michaels was perhaps not prolific enough to build a widely popular career), was I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, a collection as strong as the first.
The Men's Club, Michaels' first novel, is a story-like, relatively short comedic work that simultaneously attacks and celebrates the absurdities of men as they gather in a kind of urban support group. In 1986, the novel was made into a popular film, directed by Peter Medak, with the screenplay by Michaels, and starring Roy Scheider, Harvey Keitel, Stockard Channing and Frank Langella.
Sylvia is a fictionalized memoir of Michael's first wife, Sylvia Bloch, who committed suicide.
Michaels was a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
His son Jesse Michaels was the vocalist and primary lyricist in the seminal underground punk rock band Operation Ivy.
Selected publications
- Going Places (1969, ISBN 0-374-16496-7)
- I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975, ISBN 0-374-17411-3)
- The Men's Club (1981, ISBN 0-374-20782-8) (filmed in 1986)
- Shuffle (1990, ISBN 0-374-26349-3)
- Sylvia (1992, ISBN 1-56279-029-3)
- Time Out of Mind (1999, ISBN 1-57322-819-2)
- A Girl With a Monkey: New and Selected Stories (2000, ISBN 1-56279-120-6)
- The Collected Stories (2007, ISBN 0-374-12654-2)
- The Essays of Leonard Michaels 2009, ISBN 978-0-374-14880-5
