Vance Bourjaily Biography

American novelist, born in Cleveland, Ohio, educated at Bowdoin College, Maine. His first novel, The End of My Life (1947), the story of four young American volunteers in the British Army ambulance corps during the Second World War, established him as a distinctive voice amongst a younger generation of American novelists who began their literary careers in the late 1940s. Of his later novels, The Violated (1958) is perhaps his most ambitious and sustained his early promise. His other novels include The Hound of Earth (1954), which concerns a scientist who deserts his job and family after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; Confessions of a Spent Youth (1960), a salacious semi-autobiographical work; Brill Among the Ruins (1970); Now Playing at Canterbury (1976), a Chaucerian pastiche set in the America of the 1960s and early 1970s; A Game Men Play (1980); The Great Fake Book (1986); and Old Soldier (1990). The Unnatural Enemy (1963), Country Matters (1973), and Fishing by Mail (1993) are nonfictional works about country life, the first notable for its treatment of the ethics of hunting. Bourjaily served with the American Field Service during the Second World War and from 1958 until 1980 was a professor in the Iowa Writers' Workshop.