| Abstract: | Gilbert Sorrentino was born on April 27, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York. In 1956, Sorrentino, together with some friends from Brooklyn College, founded a literary magazine called Neon. The issues[...] that Sorrentino edited, from 1956 to 1960, contained contributions from many prominent writers, including William Carlos Williams, LeRoi Jones, Hubert Selby, Jr, Fielding Dawson, and Joel Oppenheimer. A prolific writer, Sorrentino has published over twenty volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays. Author David Markson was born in Albany, New York, on December 20, 1927. During the 1940s and '50s, he worked as a writer for the Albany Times-Union (1944-46, 1949-50), as well as an editor and a professor of English in the 60s and 70s, in addition to publishing prose, poetry, and a critical student on Malcolm Lowry. The collection contains 248 item, almost all of which are typed, some bearing autograph notes, and most of which are signed. Sorrentino's letters provide a glimpse into the politics of the late twentieth-century literary world. Lamenting what he sees as the disruption of literary fiction by popular, but artistically inferior, works, Sorrentino commiserates with Markson on the condition of contemporary writing, reviewing, publishing, and bookselling, frequently by referring to his own difficulties in getting his work published and noticed. Other topics in the letters include baseball, Markson's illness, and Sorrentino's son as a novelist. |