Silent passenger larry woiwode1/13/2024 The older children, the fourth generation, are off on their own in the 1970s. Most of the novel is the story of Martin, his wife Alpha, who dies at 34, and their six children. Like his father, Charles Neumiller has been a devout Catholic all his life and so is Charles's son Martin. In one of the book's finest chapters, Woiwode shows Charles at work making his father's coffin, lovingly washing and dressing his father's body, burying him in the unhallowed ground of the farm he loved. His son Charles returns to the homestead to attend him at his death. In his old age, he is lonely and envied and unloved by his neighbors. He went all the way to the Dakota plain, where he prospered and then lost most of what he had gained. Otto Neumiller emigrated from Germany in 1881. It is about provincial bigotry and the lot of a Catholic family in a town of Methodists. It is about hardship and work, competence and incompetence, faith and distrust. It is about strength of character, spoiled character, redeemed character. It is about births and deaths, love and courtship, joy and grief, motherhood and fatherhood, childhood, adolescence, old age. The book's significant events emerge out of the natural histories of human beings. It spans four generations, and could be set in almost any century. It is a midwestern novel, an American novel, a universal Larry Woiwode's second novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, is sure to be ranked as one of the great achievements of American fiction of the 1970s. I expect a reader to emerge from my work affected, if not with a change of heart.* * * What I want to do in my fiction, with the help of the prose I work at, is to keep all of the reader's senses informed on every moment that he lives within a certain character's skin. Or there was a conscious attempt to make this so. The rhythm of every sentence of the six-hundred-and-some pages of Beyond the Bedroom Wall is modulated to fit the voice that speaks it. Each book is a separate entity with its special demands, since each is lived by a different character, or series of them. In my books I try to convey the contours and textures of life as it's lived. Its structure is still valid and its language full of sparks. Besides trying to keep up on contemporaries and present trends, I like to read in the century of our language's flowering, in the Elizabethans and metaphysical poets, for instance, and all of the early novelists and novels, such as Pilgrim's Progress. But I believe that our language, and its heritage, is too rich to be relegated to the utilitarian. If this seems a paradox, it perhaps is it sometimes feels so as I work. Yet I work in my books to make the prose do as much as it is able, in realms of rhythm, imagery, and underlying sound. (1981) I believe that prose should be set down so that the readers sees through it to the book's essential action: a fireplace screen behind which the blaze burns, as I've expressed it elsewhere. Fargo, North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 2000.* Manuscript Collection:Īllen Memorial Library, Valley City State University, North Dakota. The Aristocrat of the West: Biography of Harold Schafer. What I Think I Did: A Season of Survival in Two Acts (memoir). Fargo, North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1970.Įven Tide. Poetry North: Five North Dakota Poets, with others. "Summer Storms," in Paris Review, Spring 1990. New York, Farrar Straus, 1981.īorn Brothers. New York, Farrar Straus, 1969 London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970.īeyond the Bedroom Wall: A Family Album. Address: Route 1, Box 57, Mott, North Dakota, 57646, U.S.A. Agent: Candida Donadio and Associates, 231 West 22nd Street, New York, New York 10011, U.S.A. Litt.: North Dakota State University, Fargo, 1977. Awards: MacDowell fellowship, 1965 Faulkner Foundation award, 1969 Guggenheim fellowship, 1971 American Academy award, 1980 Southern Review award, for The Neumiller Stories, 1990 Aga Khan prize ( Paris Review ), 1990 John Dos Passos prize, for a literary body of work, 1991 Award of Merit, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1995. Since 1978 farmer-rancher in western North Dakota, raising grains, sheep, and quarter horses. Since 1988 professor of English, Beth-El Institute for the Arts and Sciences, Carson, North Dakota. Career: Actor in Miami and New York, 1964-65 writer-in-residence, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973-74 visiting professor, Wheaton College, Illinois, summers 19 visiting professor, 1983-84, professor of English, 1984-88, director of the Writing Program, 1985-88, and co-director of the semester in London program, Spring 1988, State University of New York, Binghamton. Family: Married Carole Ann Peterson in 1965 four children. Education: University of Illinois, Urbana, 1959-64, A.A. Born: Carrington, North Dakota, 30 October 1941.
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