Literary Birthday – 17 August – Evan S. Connell

Evan S. Connell was born on 17 August 1924 and died on 10 January 2013.

Evan S. Connell Quotes

1. Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it. It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter? As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did. (Mrs. Bridge)
2. She spent a great deal of time staring into space, oppressed by the sense that she was waiting. But waiting for what? She did not know. Surely someone would call, someone must be needing her. Yet each day proceeded like the one before. Nothing intense, nothing desperate, ever happened. Time did not move. The home, the city, the nation, and life itself were eternal; still she had a foreboding that one day, without warning and without pity, all the dear, important things would be destroyed. So it was that her thoughts now and then turned deviously deeper, spiralling down and down in search of the final recess, of life more immutable than the life she had bequeathed in the birth of her children. (Mrs. Bridge)
3. I was supposed to become a physician, to follow my father in the family practice. His father had been a physician. My father was also Evan S. Connell. (The Paris Review)
4. Sometimes I have no idea what critics are talking about. (The Paris Review)
5. I wrote all day every day. Used to be if I was in a good place I could write all day long and be anxious to get up in the morning. (The Paris Review)
6. Sure I get lonely. You get accustomed to yourself as you go on, though. You don’t feel that piercing loneliness as you did when young. I couldn’t marry because then I’d have to support a wife and family, and I never wanted to take a job I hated. I always feared that. Sure, you miss something. Sure, you give up stuff. But I don’t like things hanging around my neck. (Harpers)

Evan S. Connell was an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and author of epic historical works. He was the author of 18 books, which included Francisco Goya, Deus Lo Volt!, Mrs. Bridge, and Son of the Morning Star. His last short-story collection, Lost in Uttar Pradesh, was published in 2008. His works explored philosophical and cultural facets of the American experience. He received numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2009 Connell was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, which recognises achievement in fiction.

Source for photograph: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell, Author photo by Ruth Bernhard, 1963.

by Amanda Patterson
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