Jul 30, 2025 10:56 PM
(This post was last modified: Jul 31, 2025 12:10 AM by C C.)
Although he was certainly no publisher or a literary critic like some of those below (and wrote speculative fiction rather than mainstream), Harlan Ellison seemed to mimic that testosterone template. He was very short, too, like Napoleon (i.e., potentially insecure). He had an abrasive and argumentative temperament, was a skirt-chaser, was known for violent incidents of slugging people when they were wholly unprepared, was intermittently rude to fans, and heavily litigious. Contrast with Isaac Asimov, who was virtually the opposite. But OTOH, Ellison went out of his way to mentor vulnerable and budding science fiction writers like Octavia E. Butler.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Colony, Aviary and Zoo
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/...ry-and-zoo
EXCERPTS: The first issue of Partisan Review included a section from James T. Farrell’s once famous Studs Lonigan trilogy, which relates the young manhood and eventual destruction of a Catholic boy from Chicago, as well as improving tales written in would-be proletarian style. There was an attack on bourgeois literary critics...
[...] Some women attracted to the magazine wrote so well that they crashed through the boys’ club indifference and scepticism. McCarthy was there at the beginning. Elizabeth Hardwick, a Southerner who moved to New York in 1939, aspiring ‘to be a Jewish New York intellectual’, began writing for the magazine in 1945. The umbrageous Diana Trilling, wife of Lionel and often at war with the others, started writing book reviews for the Nation after 1941 and lengthy moralising essays for PR in 1950. Hannah Arendt first wrote for PR in 1944, after arriving in 1941 on the Upper West Side.
[...] Many people resented the New York group, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when their influence was obvious. Several publishing houses (Farrar, Straus, Simon & Schuster, Knopf) were run by Jews and talk of conspiracy became commonplace.
In The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing and Postwar American Literature (2022), Josh Lambert reports that Jack Kerouac, who managed to publish thirteen books in his short life, complained that ‘the Jewish literary mafia’ was holding him back. Mario Puzo also spoke of a Jewish mafia controlling award grants; perhaps, but Puzo did rather well without them. Truman Capote told Playboy in 1968 that ‘a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics ... control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines.
All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention.’ Some of the young writers in New York were depressed by their elders. ‘No one could have read as many books as they claim to have read,’ a friend of mine wailed fifty years ago. As far as Mailer was concerned, the fabulous literacy was a put-on. ‘No one knew as much as they claimed to know, no one could have passed through the galaxies of experience they were ready to judge.’
This hostility is understandable enough, but Ronnie Grinberg’s book, Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, has a single line of analysis – really, a single line of attack. She argues that the New York intellectuals were macho bully boys who strove to overcome their outsider status as Jews by consciously imitating the most conventionally aggressive forms of American masculine behaviour... (MORE - missing details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Colony, Aviary and Zoo
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/...ry-and-zoo
EXCERPTS: The first issue of Partisan Review included a section from James T. Farrell’s once famous Studs Lonigan trilogy, which relates the young manhood and eventual destruction of a Catholic boy from Chicago, as well as improving tales written in would-be proletarian style. There was an attack on bourgeois literary critics...
[...] Some women attracted to the magazine wrote so well that they crashed through the boys’ club indifference and scepticism. McCarthy was there at the beginning. Elizabeth Hardwick, a Southerner who moved to New York in 1939, aspiring ‘to be a Jewish New York intellectual’, began writing for the magazine in 1945. The umbrageous Diana Trilling, wife of Lionel and often at war with the others, started writing book reviews for the Nation after 1941 and lengthy moralising essays for PR in 1950. Hannah Arendt first wrote for PR in 1944, after arriving in 1941 on the Upper West Side.
[...] Many people resented the New York group, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when their influence was obvious. Several publishing houses (Farrar, Straus, Simon & Schuster, Knopf) were run by Jews and talk of conspiracy became commonplace.
In The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing and Postwar American Literature (2022), Josh Lambert reports that Jack Kerouac, who managed to publish thirteen books in his short life, complained that ‘the Jewish literary mafia’ was holding him back. Mario Puzo also spoke of a Jewish mafia controlling award grants; perhaps, but Puzo did rather well without them. Truman Capote told Playboy in 1968 that ‘a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics ... control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines.
All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention.’ Some of the young writers in New York were depressed by their elders. ‘No one could have read as many books as they claim to have read,’ a friend of mine wailed fifty years ago. As far as Mailer was concerned, the fabulous literacy was a put-on. ‘No one knew as much as they claimed to know, no one could have passed through the galaxies of experience they were ready to judge.’
This hostility is understandable enough, but Ronnie Grinberg’s book, Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, has a single line of analysis – really, a single line of attack. She argues that the New York intellectuals were macho bully boys who strove to overcome their outsider status as Jews by consciously imitating the most conventionally aggressive forms of American masculine behaviour... (MORE - missing details)