Chandler Brossard

Chandler Brossard (July 18, 1922 – August 29, 1993) was an American novelist, writer, editor, and teacher. He wrote or edited a total of 17 books. With a challenging style and outsider characters, Brossard had limited critical success in the United States. His novels were more appreciated in France and Great Britain.

His early works have been described as "landmarks of the postwar American novel." and had brothers Vincent and Boyd and a sister Adele. Both their mother Therese and father were from educated Mormon elite and upper-middle-class families who were major landowners in the area. After the parents separated, Brossard's mother struggled to support the family.

During his career, Brossard worked for several magazines: he went on to become a senior editor for Time magazine, managing editor at Coronet, executive editor for The American Mercury, and senior editor for Look magazine (1956–67).

More recently, the novel has been characterized as existential, closer to works such as Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Albert Camus' L'Étranger (1942).

Brossard wrote four plays, all produced in St. Louis, Missouri, in the 1960s. Brossard tended to write about characters who were outsiders: "thieves, chimney sweeps, harlots, counterculture activists..." and used the idiomatic language of mostly spoken voice. Brossard responded in kind. The two men, former friends in the 1940s, had a continuing conflict.

After 1973, Brossard's fiction was published only by small presses, such as Cherry Valley, Realities Library, and Redbeck Press. Dalkey Archive Press published his final full-length novel, As the Wolf Howls at The Door, in 1992. In interviews with Moore in 1985, Brossard said of his work:

I think they can all be understood in a deeply religious sense. I think the thing that is continuous in this writing of mine is this almost blind religious innocence, of the religious innocent. Now the religious innocent is an inextricable part of religious literature throughout the ages....The believer who believes in miracles persists in going on. In none of my work has the innocent voice lost its innocence. It may be covered with blood, but it has never become a cynical, pessimistic voice. Since 2000, Brossard's first two novels have been reprinted with new introductions by Steven Moore (see below).

Marriage and family He first married Sally Ciccarelli and had two daughters: Iris Brossard, an accomplished poet and writer, and Marie Brossard. Brossard later married Maria Ewing Huffman. Their daughter Genève Brossard, born in 1977, later became an arts teacher and professional boxer. He and Maria divorced in the late 1980s. Brossard's papers are held by Syracuse University.

Works Novels Who Walk in Darkness (1952; reprint 2000, with introduction by Steven Moore) The Bold Saboteurs (1953; reprint 2001, with introduction by Steven Moore) All Passion Spent (1954) The Wrong Turn (1954), pseud. Daniel Harper The Double View (1960; reprint 2022 as The Double Dealers, with introduction by Zachary Tanner and afterword by Iris Brossard)) The Girls in Rome (1961) Episode with Erika (1963) The Nymphets (1963), pseud. Daniel Harper A Man for All Women (1966) Wake Up. We're Almost There (1971; reprint 2020, with introduction by Zachary Tanner) Did Christ Make Love? (1973; reprint 2021 as The Wolf Leaps, with introduction by Zachary Tanner and foreword by Steven Moore) Dirty Books for Little Folks (1978) Raging Joys, Sublime Violations (1981; reprint 2020, with introduction by Rick Harsch) A Chimney Sweep Comes Clean (1985) Closing the Gap (1987) As the Wolf Howls at My Door (1992; reprint 2021, with introduction by Zachary Tanner)

Short stories Included in The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men (1984), by Kingsley Amis, Anatole Broyard, Jack Kerouac and Chandler Brossard Over the Rainbow? Hardly: Collected Short Seizures (2005)

Non-fiction The Insane World of Adolf Hitler (1966), biography The Spanish Scene (1968), vignettes

Anthologies The Scene Before You: A New Approach to American Culture (1955), 24 essays on aspects of sex and science, movies and Greenwich Village. The First Time (1957), short stories—as are all the following: Desire in the Suburbs (1962) The Pangs of Love: Stories of the Young (1962) The Nymphets (1963), under the pseudonym Daniel Harper 18 Best Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (1965), nominally co-edited by Vincent Price. Wives and Lovers (1965) Love Me, Love Me! (1966) Marriage Games (1967) I Want More of This (1967) In Other Beds (1968)