Drewey Wayne Gunn - Gay American Novels, 1870-1970: A Readers Guide

Also by DREWEY WAYNE GUNN

Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth,
18811981: A Readers Guide (McFarland, 2014)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2522-5

2016 Drewey Wayne Gunn. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover image 2016 iStock

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

1.Bayard Taylor; Frederick Loring

2.Alan Dale (Alfred J. Cohen)

3.Charles Warren Stoddard

4.Edward Prime Stevenson (as Xavier Mayne)

5.George Sylvester Viereck

6.Henry Blake Fuller; Sherwood Anderson

7.Carl Van Vechten; Joseph Moncure March

8.Clarkson Crane

9.Robert McAlmon; Robert Sculley

10.Benjamin Musser

11.Claude McKay; Wallace Thurman

12.Charles Brackett

13.Myron Brinig

14.Dashiell Hammett; Raymond Chandler

15.John Dos Passos

16.Blair Niles

17.Andre Tellier

18.Bradford Ropes; Fitzroy Davis

19.Forman Brown (as Richard Meeker)

20.Rex Stout

21.Kennilworth Bruce

22.Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler; Djuna Barnes

23.Edgar Calmer

24.Lew Levenson; Daphne Greenwood

25.Harold S. Kahm (aka Jerry Cole)

26.Alan Campbell (as Arion)

27.Elliot Paul

28.Carson McCullers

29.Harlan McIntosh

30.Charles Jackson

31.Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar); Margaret Millar

32.William Maxwell

33.Kenneth Fearing; Carley Mills

34.Alfred Hayes; Calder Willingham

35.Willard Motley

36.Gordon Merrick

37.John Horne Burns; Vance Bourjaily; A. M. P. Statton

38.Gore Vidal; Hugh Wheeler

39.Norman Mailer

40.Truman Capote; Speed Lamkin

41.Hubert Creekmore; Thomas Hal Phillips; William Faulkner

42.Klaus Mann; Marguerite Yourcenar

43.Nial Kent

44.Ward Thomas (Edward T. McNamara)

45.Michael de Forrest; Harrison Dowd

46.Isabel Bolton; Grace Zaring Stone

47.Eugene MacCown

48.James Barr (James Barr Fugat)

49.Loren Wahl (Lorenzo Magdalena); Martin Dibner; Dennis Murphy

50.Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons); David Karp; Gerald Sykes; Allen Drury

51.Theodora Keogh; Vin Packer (Marijane Meaker); Patricia Highsmith

52.George Sklar

53.Paul Goodman

54.Fritz Peters; Gerald Tesch

55.Russell Thacher; Ralph Leveridge; Jim Barbee; Marc Rivette

56.Jay Little

57.Chester Himes; Christopher Teale

58.Mary MacLaren; Alexander Randolph; Deborah Deutsch

59.John Goodwin; John Cromwell

60.John Lee Weldon; Flannery OConnor

61.John Selby

62.Christopher Isherwood

63.Edmund Schiddel

64.Richard McKaye (Richard K. Brunner); Marietta Wolff; Pamela Moore; Walter Ross; Ronn Marvin; Richard Sale; Gavin Lambert

65.Lonnie Coleman

66.Patrick Dennis

67.James Baldwin

68.Mary Orr; Roy Doliner; Basil Burwell; Russell ONeil

69.Milton Rebow

70.David Stacton; Robert B. Asprey

71.William Talsman

72.Herbert D. Kastle

73.Reginald Harvey

74.Ben Travis

75.Martin Mayer

76.William S. Burroughs; Alexander Trocchi; Irving Rosenthal

77.Alexander Fedoroff

78.Donald Windham

79.Julian Green

80.Thomas Doremus

81.Lou Rand Hogan (as Lou Rand); William Gingerich

82.David Loovis; Susan Sontag

83.Roger Davis; Charles Wright; Joe Leon Houston; Alexander Goodman (George Haimsohn); Seth Young

84.Vladimir Nabokov

85.Paul Mandel; Roderick Thorp

86.Thomas Baird

87.John Rechy

88.Burt Blechmann

89.Hubert Selby, Jr.

90.Edwin Fey

91.William Goldman

92.R. V. Cassill

93.K. B. Raul

94.R. McCoy

95.James H. Ramp

96.Joseph Hansen

97.James Leo Herlihy; Richard Miles; Dotson Rader

98.Sanford Friedman; Bernard Malamud

99.Casimir Dukahz

100.Tennessee Williams

101.Tom Lockwood

102.Frederic Prokosch

103.Samuel R. Delany

104.George Baxt

105.Victor J. Banis; A. Jay

106.Richard Amory; Ricardo Armory

107.Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner; Frank Yerby

108.Don Carpenter; Malcolm Braly

109.James Purdy

110.Alfred Chester

111.Robert Somerlott

112.Bruce King (Avery Willard)

113.Nathaniel Burt

114.John Coriolan

115.James Kirkwood

116.Ursula Zilinsky

117.Ronald Tavel

118.Peter Menegas

119.Samuel M. Steward (as Phil Andros)

120.Frank Newman (Sam Abrams); Angelo dArcangelo (Josef Bush)

121.William Carney; Dirk Vanden; Larry Townsend

122.Stephen Koch

123.John Donovan

124.Hunce Voelcker

125.Hadrian Keene

126.Dennis Selby

127.Jeff Lawton

128.Bruce Benderson

129.David Plante

130.Andrew Blumley

131.John Weitz

132.William Harrington

133.Gerald Walker; Donald E. Westlake (as Tucker Coe)

There have been three previous surveys of the territory covered in this guide: by Georges-Michel Sarotte, Roger Austen, and James Levin. Why do we need another? For starters, 78 of the 257 novels here appear in none of them. Some of the omissions startle (Dashiell Hammett, Wallace Thurman, Samuel Delany, Ursula Zilinsky, David Plante); others are understandable but no less regrettable (Alan Campbell, Hugh Wheeler, David Stacton, Julian Green, Stephen Koch). Even for those 179 works in common, my readings sometimes differ markedly from theirs. It is not a question of our ages: the four of us were born within five years of each other. Rather it stems, I think, from having passed from the politics of liberation to a post-gay nostalgia. I am not interested in distinguishing between high and low literature, and I seem to enjoy satire and erotica, metafictional games and comedy, more than they. Whenever possible, I have put the work into a biographical as well as a social context. Above all, when I reflect how my memory of my first encounter with a novel differs from the way I now read it, I am struck forcefully that ever so often a totally new survey is called for; there cannot be, and never should be, a definitive guide.

That does not mean that the earlier guides do not continue to hold interest, for both their differing viewpoints and as historical documents of readings made in the flush of excitement after the Stonewall Inn uprising. Sarotte finished his doctoral dissertation Comme un frre, comme un amant in 1974 for the Sorbonne; it was published in 1976 and translated into English in 1978. Not surprisingly, it worked within the accepted canon, from Herman Melville to James Baldwin. In this way he headed a line of gay American academics, who, unlike their lesbian counterparts, seem more interested in outing established figures than in recovering forgotten works. Austens