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Harold Brodkey
Harold Brodkey, by Howard Coale forThe New Yorker, 1995
Born	Aaron Roy Weintraub (1930-10-25)October 25, 1930 Staunton, Illinois, U.S.
Died	January 26, 1996(1996-01-26) (aged 65) New York City,New York, U.S.
Occupation	Writer
Awards	O. Henry Award (1975 & 1976)

Harold Brodkey (October 25, 1930 – January 26, 1996), bornAaron Roy Weintraub, was an American short-story writer andnovelist.

Aaron Weintraub was the second child to his Jewish parents Max Weintraub and Celia Glazer Weintraub (1899–1932), born inStaunton, Illinois. Samuel Weintraub (1928–2017) was their oldest child. When their mother died, Samuel was four and old enough to remain with his father but Aaron, only two years old, was adopted by his father's cousin, Doris Rubenstein Brodkey (1896–1949) and her husband, Joseph Brodkey (1896–1946) and renamed Harold Roy Brodkey. Doris and Joseph lived inUniversity City, Missouri, with their daughter, Marilyn Ruth Brodkey (1923–2011). Brodkey would chronicle his life with his adoptive parents and sister in his short stories and his novel,The Runaway Soul.

After graduating fromHarvard University with anA.B.cum laude in 1952, Brodkey married his first wife, Joanna Brown, a Radcliffe graduate, and their only child, Ann Emily Brodkey, was born in 1953. With the aid of his editor, William Maxwell, a childhood friend of his wife, Brodkey began his writing career by contributing short stories toThe New Yorker and other magazines. His stories received two first-placeO. Henry Awards. Brodkey was a staff writer forThe New Yorker until the end of his life.

In 1993, Weintraub announced inThe New Yorker that he had contractedAIDS; he later wroteThis Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (1996), about his battle with the disease. At the time of his death in 1996,^[1] he was living inNew York City with his second wife, novelistEllen Brodkey (née Schwamm). Brodkey contracted the HIV virus from a homosexual relationship, though he reportedly did not consider himself to be gay.^[2]

Brodkey's career began with the short-story collectionFirst Love and Other Sorrows.

Six years later, he signed a book contract withRandom House for his first novel, tentatively titledA Party of Animals (it was also referred to asThe Animal Corner). The unfinished novel was subsequently resold toFarrar, Straus & Giroux in 1970, then toKnopf in 1979. As aParis Review interview noted, "The work became something of an object of desire for editors; it was moved among publishing houses for what were rumored to be ever-increasing advances, advertised as a forthcoming title (Party of Animals) in book catalogs, expanded and ceaselessly revised, until its publication seemed an event longer awaited than anything without theological implications."^[3] In 1983, theSaturday Review referred toA Party of Animals as "now reportedly comprising 4,000 pages and announced as forthcoming 'next year' every year since 1973."^[4]

During this period, Brodkey published a number of stories, most of them inThe New Yorker, that dealt with a set of recurring characters—the evidently autobiographical Wiley Silenowicz and his adoptive family—and which were announced as fragments of the novel.^[5] Critics who disliked Brodkey's work described his tone as too talkative and overly focused on his own childhood.^[6][7][8] Several weeks after Brodkey announced inThe New Yorker in 1993 that he was suffering from AIDS, thePulitzer Prize-winning poetRichard Howard wrote inThe New Republic that the disclosure was "a matter of manipulative hucksterism, of mendacious self-propaganda and cruel assertion of artistic privilege, whereby death is made a matter of public relations."^[9]

In addition to publishing, Brodkey earned a living during this period by writingtelevision pilot scripts forNBC, and teaching atCornell University. Three long stories fromA Party of Animals were collected inWomen and Angels (1985), and a larger number, including those three, appeared in 1988'sStories in an Almost Classical Mode. Brodkey had apparently^{[according to whom?]} decided to omit them from the novel, for when, in 1991, he publishedThe Runaway Soul, a very long novel (835 pages) dramatizing Wiley's early life, no material fromStories in an Almost Classical Mode was included. The novel seems to be^{[according to whom?]} eitherA Party of Animals under a new title or the first volume of an eventual multivolume work. Brodkey made some comments that suggested the latter.

Brodkey's second novel,Profane Friendship, appeared in 1994.

• First Love and Other Sorrows (1958,ISBN 0-8050-6010-3)
• Women and Angels (1985,ISBN 0-8276-0250-2) (3 stories, all later included in his 1988 collection).
• Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988,ISBN 0-679-72431-1)
• The World is the Home of Love and Death (1997,ISBN 0-8050-5999-7)

• The Runaway Soul (1991,ISBN 0-374-25286-6)
• Profane Friendship (1994,ISBN 0-374-52973-6)

• This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (1996,ISBN 0-8050-4831-6)
• My Venice (1998,ISBN 0-8050-4833-2)
• Sea Battles on Dry Land: Essays (1999,ISBN 0-8050-6052-9)

• Jonathan Baskin, "Fading Fast,"BookforumArchived 2006-11-29 at theWayback Machine
• Harold Brodkey resources on the Web
• "People: Harold Brodkey",The New York Times
• James Linville (Winter 1991)."Harold Brodkey, The Art of Fiction No. 126".Paris Review. Winter 1991 (121).

• 1930 births
• 1996 deaths
• 20th-century American novelists
• 20th-century American male writers
• 20th-century American memoirists
• Cornell University faculty
• O. Henry Award winners
• Novelists from Illinois
• Novelists from Missouri
• Novelists from New York (state)
• Harvard Advocate alumni
• People from Staunton, Illinois
• Writers from St. Louis County, Missouri
• AIDS-related deaths in New York (state)
• Jewish American novelists
• American male novelists
• American male short story writers
• 20th-century American short story writers
• American male non-fiction writers
• 20th-century American Jews

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