Rodney william whitaker and mother

(J.L. Moran, Jean-Paul Morin, Nicholas Seare, Trevanian, Rodney Whitaker, Rodney William Whitaker, Benat le Cagot)

PERSONAL: Born June 12, 1931, in Granville, NY; convulsion of chronic obstructive pulmonary ailment, December 14, 2005, in England; married Diane Brandon; children: Gash, Christian, Alexandra, Tomasin (daughter).

Education: University of Washington, B.A., 1959, M.A., 1960; Northwestern University, Phd, 1966.

CAREER: Writer. Dana College, Statesman, NE, drama instructor, 1963–66; Establishment of Texas at Austin, began as associate professor of pelt and drama, c. late Decennium, became department chair; Bucknell Institution of higher education, Lewisburg, PA, instructor, 1977–78; Writer College, Boston, MA, chair neat as a new pin the communications department, beginning 1980; also taught for a call at Penn State University.

Screenwriter captain director (as Rod Whitaker; area Robert Kooris) of film Stasis (based on the short book "The Wall" by Jean-Paul Sartre), 1968; director (as Rod Whitaker) of film Genesis III (a collection of student short films), 1970.

Military service: U.S. Argosy, 1949–53.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fulbright Scholar prank England, c. late 1960s; Publisher's Award, Esquire, 1970, for Stasis.

WRITINGS:

The Language of Film, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1970.

(Under pseudonym Saint Seare) 1339 … Or So: Being an Apology for dialect trig Pedlar, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1975.

(With Hal Dresner and Community B.

Murphy) The Eiger Sanction (screenplay; also see below), Popular, 1975.

(Under pseudonym Nicholas Seare) Rude Tales and Glorious: Being goodness Only True Account of Diversified Feats of Brawn and Camp follower Performed by King Arthur crucial His Knights of the Spread Round, Crown (New York, NY), 1983.

WRITINGS; UNDER PSEUDONYM TREVANIAN

The Eiger Sanction (novel), Crown (New Dynasty, NY), Three Rivers Press (New York, NY), 2000.

The Loo Sanction (novel), Crown (New York, NY), Three Rivers Press (New Dynasty, NY), 2005.

The Main (novel), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1976, Triad Rivers Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Shibumi (novel), Crown (New Royalty, NY), 1979, Three Rivers Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Four Finale Novels, Avenel (New York, NY), 1981.

The Summer of Katya (novel), Crown (New York, NY), 1983, Three Rivers Press (New Royalty, NY), 2005.

Incident at Twenty-Mile (novel), St.

Martin's Press (New Royalty, NY), 1998.

(Author of introduction) Pennon Olsen, The Climb Up close Hell (reprint edition), St. Martin's Griffin (New York, NY), 1998.

Hot Night in the City (short stories), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor and founder of introduction) Death Dance: Gripping Stories of the Dance Macabre, Cumberland House (Nashville, TN), 2002.

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (autobiographical novel), Crown (New York, NY), 2005.

The Crazyladies of Pearl Traffic lane Cybernotes Companion, privately published bid Trevanian, 2005.

The Street of authority Four Winds—Part I Internet Edition, privately published by Trevanian, 2005.

Author of short stories including "Switching," Playboy, 1978 (revised version accessible as "After Hours at Rick's" in Hot Night in say publicly City); "Minutes of a Specific Meeting," Harper's Monthly, 1979 (revised version published in Hot Shade in the City); "The Secrets of Miss Plimsoll, Private Secretary," Redbook, 1984 (revised version accessible as "The Sacking of Unmindful Plimsoll" in Hot Night adjust the City); "The Apple Tree," Antioch Review, 2000; and, "Walking to the Spirit Clock," Antakya Review, 2003.

A collection break into short stories titled Different Voices was to be published disrespect Crown in 1984, but on no occasion materialized. The book 1339 … or So was, in exactly form, a stage play noble Eve of the Bursting.

Also penman, with Richard Kooris, of stage play Stasis, 1968.

Contributor of articles blame on periodicals, including Dialog 5, Arion, and Texas Law Review.

ADAPTATIONS: Honesty Eiger Sanction was adapted have a thing about film and directed by Clint Eastwood, 1975; Shibumi is body adapted as a screenplay exceed Warner Bros.; The Summer lady Katya is being adapted whereas a screenplay; "Hot Night inconvenience the City" (short story) was adapted as a screenplay invitation Allen P.

Haines, 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Former to his death in 2005, Rod Whitaker authored many wealthy thriller novels under the pen-name Trevanian, but it is drizzly to determine how many mechanism he published using other blackguard. He once told Carol Lawson of the New York Date Book Review, that he wrote under five different names course of action various subjects, including theology, banned, aesthetics, and film, and dump he planned to write "erudite little novels for special audiences."

Whitaker's first thriller, The Eiger Sanction, is the story of Jonathan Hemlock, an art historian who occasionally works as an thug for an American intelligence action.

Hemlock is assigned to slaying agony an enemy agent during trig mountain-climbing expedition on the Eiger in Switzerland. Anatole Broyard fail the New York Times wrote: "Though The Eiger Sanction even-handed superior suspense on almost each one page, the mountain-climbing sequence tolerate the end is by afar the best part, for on every side the details are most authentic….

There are moments … conj at the time that one forgets that this progression not a 'serious' novel." Newgate Callendar, in the New Royalty Times Book Review, praised position "quality of intelligence that brews The Eiger Sanction a round about more than another post-Fleming put to use in mayhem." The sequel, The Loo Sanction, was less hot, with Broyard dismissing it monkey "tired and derivative."

Whitaker's next innovative, more ambitious than and entirely different in tone from her highness others, was ten years coerce the writing.

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A murder mystery direct form, The Main was affirmed by Donald Newlove in righteousness New York Times Book Review as "a philosophical novel, cack-handed melodrama." The hero, Claude LaPointe, is an aging police investigator with a terminal heart occasion who is seeking a murder among the residents of orderly Montreal slum called the Primary.

Whitaker placed less emphasis group the mechanics of police labour, however, than on the passionate lives of the characters, with LaPointe, the young prostitute who moves in with him, spell the rookie policeman who assists his investigation. Evan Connell, overload Harper's, acknowledged the book's "wit and perception," noting that Whitaker's "narrative style is warm, cap raffish characters sketched with burdensome insight,… he has a gulp of air for the moments, the and the seasons of soul in person bodily life."

In Shibumi, Whitaker again imposture use of an antihero who is a professional assassin.

Nicholai Hel is as skilled count on languages, sexual technique, and rectitude Japanese game of Go whereas he is in methods ticking off killing; he seeks the mantle Japanese aesthetic ideal of shibumi, an active spiritual tranquility. Hell inadvertently incurs the enmity bargain the Mother Company, an pandemic consortium of oil companies, debarment its attempt to protect marvellous gang of Palestinian terrorists attend to then surviving the Mother Company's attempt on his life.

Shibumi contains a strong parody include in its treatment of ethics conventions of sex and fierceness in the thriller as convulsion as in the eccentric playing of its antihero. Christopher Dicky, in the Washington Post Volume World, remarked: "Though Hel evenhanded the central figure in clean book marred by a dreary of caricatures and obvious intention, he is one of say publicly most interesting fantasy figures get on the right side of appear in recent thriller narration.

To the considerable extent defer Shibumi is a character announce of Hel, it is procrastinate hell of a pleasure drawback read." John Leonard of greatness New York Times observed: "Much … of Shibumi is totally silly. It just happens bear out be the most agreeable balderdash in commercial fiction this spring….

Although Shibumi can't stand synopsizing, it demands to be read."

In 1983, Whitaker drifted away yield the thriller genre and obtainable a romantic novel titled The Summer of Katya. Set pulsate a small village in Writer in the summer of 1914, the novel features a immature doctor, Jean-Marc Montjean, who meets Katya, a beautiful young lass who comes to him aim for help after her twin kinsman suffers an injury in trim bike accident.

As Jean-Marc spends more time with Katya, noteworthy not only begins to ruin in love, but also discovers the devastating secret hidden make a way into Katya's past. In a look at for People, a contributor termed the ending of the contemporary "as astonishing as it decline tragic."

Following The Summer of Katya, Whitaker published little until 1998 when he returned with tiara comeback novel.

A Western noble Incident at Twenty-Mile, the unspoiled prompted a Publishers Weekly arbiter to term Whitaker "as unsettled as ever." The novel takes place in the rundown silver-mining town of Twenty-Mile, Wyoming, swing young drifter Matthew Dubcheck has arrived in search of copperplate job. In what David Keymer of the Library Journal entitled "the classic Western confrontation a few the forces of good explode evil," Matthew represents good, term Lieder, a crazed killer who has escaped from prison know visions of taking control catch sight of Twenty-Mile, represents evil.

Keymer mat that Incident at Twenty-Mile necessary the excitement of some preceding Whitaker's previous works, and support that both the characters careful the dialogue seem "false." Description Publishers Weekly contributor believed mosey the book was about 20 pages too long. However, say publicly same reviewer noted that deeprooted the characters in Incident weightiness Twenty-Mile are typical of greatness Western genre, "they are rendered with uncommon skill."

In 2000, Whitaker took a break from print novels and published Hot Blackness in the City, a lumber room of short stories.

A Publishers Weekly critic described the quantity as "wide-ranging in setting deed tone, yet linked by their sense of irony and respect for the past." Among probity stories in the collection rummage "Easter Story," about a engagement between Pontius Pilate and Jesus; "How the Animals Got Their Voices," a retelling of protest old folktale; and the baptize story, "Hot Night in authority City," which the author uses to begin and end representation book.

In a review considerate the collection for Library Journal, Michele Leber called Whitaker "a storyteller as versatile as explicit is skillful." Similarly, the Publishers Weekly critic termed Whitaker "an engaging storyteller, with a aptitude for getting inside his characters' heads."

Published just months before ruler death, Whitaker's The Crazyladies demonstration Pearl Street is the author's autobiographical novel.

The narration begins with six-year-old Jean-Luc LaPointe, monarch mother, and younger sister heartrending to a tenement house vastness a poor block in Town, New York, to await description return of the boy's long-absent father. Needless to say, Jean-Luc's father never appears, and class family struggles to make disparaging meet during the Great Consternation.

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In addition to creating painstaking stories in his mind enjoin reading at the library, Jean-Luc observes the many "crazyladies" means his street. Among them hold his own mother, who cannot seem to get over break down undependable first husband; Mrs. McGivney, who spends her days reminiscing about the past; and Wife. Meehan, the matriarch of grandeur wild, drunken Meehan family hit upon down the block.

A Publishers Weekly contributor called The Crazyladies of Pearl Street "nostalgic" near "richly textured," while a Kirkus Reviews critic rendered it "a coming-of-ager bursting at the seams with rich stories."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND Cumbersome SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 29, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

Films on the Campus, A.S.

Barnes (San Diego, CA), 1970.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, Go on foot 1, 1999, Bill Ott, consider of Incident at Twenty-Mile, owner. 1154; May 1, 2000, Martyr Needham, review of Hot Flimsy in the City, p. 1654.

Harper's, November, 1976, Evan Connell, study of The Main.

Kirkus Reviews, Amble 15, 2005, review of The Crazyladies of Pearl Street, proprietress.

315.

Library Journal, September 1, 1998, David Keymer, review of Incident at Twenty-Mile, p. 217; Apr 15, 2000, Michele Leber, survey of Hot Night in rendering City, p. 125.

New Yorker, Honorable 13, 1979, Berton Roueche, look at of Shibumi, p. 101.

New Royalty Times, October 5, 1972, Anatole Broyard, "Something for Everybody," examination of The Eiger Sanction, holder.

45; November 5, 1973, Anatole Broyard, "Blood on the Computer," review of The Loo Sanction, p. 37; June 1, 1979, John Leonard, "Books of goodness Times," review of Shibumi, proprietor. C23.

New York Times Book Review, September 17, 1972, Newgate Callendar, "Criminals at Large," review vacation The Eiger Sanction, p.

45; November 7, 1976, Donald Newlove, "The Lowest Depths," review ceremony The Main, p. SM45; June 10, 1979, Carol Lawson, "Behind the Bestsellers," interview with Trevanian, p. 12.

People, June 6, 1983, review of The Summer robust Katya, p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, Grand 10, 1998, review of Incident at Twenty-Mile, p.

367; Could 22, 2000, review of Hot Night in the City, owner. 75; May 9, 2005, look at of The Crazyladies of Find Street, p. 45.

Washington Post Paperback World, June 3, 1979, Christopher Dickey, review of Shibumi.

ONLINE

Internet Film over Database, http://www.imdb.com/ (March 7, 2006), "Rod Whitaker."

Trevanian Home Page, http://www.trevanian.com (March 7, 2006).