Tar Beach

by Richard Elman

Book by Elman, Richard

273 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1991

About the author

Richard Elman, novelist, poet, critic, and teacher was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, graduated from Syracuse University in 1955 and received a master's degree at Stanford University two years later. He worked variously as a public affairs director for WBAI-FM in New York, a correspondent in Central America, a ghostwriter for a poverty program, and teacher of creative writing at many places, including Columbia University, the Bennington College Summer Writing Workshops, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. A self-described socialist, Elman published more than twenty books,including a pungent comic novel, Tar Beach (1991), in which he related the story of an 8 year-old boy growing up Jewish in Brooklyn after World War II. In the New York Times Book Review, John Domini called it a "first-rate" novel that delivers "with admirable light-heartedness" the bad news of just how fragile family life is wont to be. "Rarely has a slice of life been cut so thin, so elegantly," Mr. Domini wrote.

When his first novel A Coat for the Czar came out in 1959 Elmanrealized that writing fiction was all he really wanted to do. His next big project turned into a trilogy about a Hungarian Jewish family, The Twenty-Eighth Day of Elul, (1967), Lilo's Diary (1968), and The Reckoning (1969).

Throughout his career, he also contributed articles, essays and bookreviews to many publications, The New York Times frequently among them. Some of his writing, including novels, used pseudonyms (John Howland Spyker for Little Lives), because he believed that writers must speak in different voices lest they start sounding like their own echoes. His latest book, Namedropping: Mostly Literary Memoirs, is a memoir of reflections on his life and work and the people he got to know. A collection of poems, Love, Richard: Last Poems and Translations (Junction Press) and the novel Love Handles (Green Integer) will be published posthumously.

Richard Elman is survived by his wife of 20 years Alice Elman; theirdaughter, Lila Elman, his elder daughter Margaret Elman; and his brother Leonard Elman. A memorial, The Richard Elman Lecture in Creative Writing, is delivered annually at Syracuse University.