Ronald Sukenick Biography

American novelist and critic, born in Brooklyn, New York City, educated at Brandeis University. Ever since his involvement with the Fiction Collective, which he helped to establish in 1970, Sukenick has come to be regarded as one of the central figures in contemporary American post-modernist fiction. Like Raymond Federman, Sukenick is as much interested in the iconic or visual character of fiction as he is in the worlds it dramatizes and his writing makes extensive use of variable typographical faces. His novels include Up (1968), Out (1973), 98.6 (1975), Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues (1979), Blown Away (1986), and Down and In: Life in the Underground (1988). The Death of the Novel and Other Stories (1969) draws together his early short stories while In Form: Digressions on the Art of Fiction (1985) is a collection of critical writings. He also wrote on the American poet Wallace Stevens, notably in Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure (1967). Sukenick became Director of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder. See The Novel as Performance: The Fiction of Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman (1986), by Jerzy Kutnick.