The Sixties: A Forged Diary

by John Crowley

Genres: Nonfiction

81 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2024

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 15th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2007. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s 100 Best Science Fiction Novels.
In 1981 came Little, Big, which Ursula Le Guin described as a book that “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.”
In 1980 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is in preparation.

Note: The John Crowley who wrote Sans épines, la rose: Tony Blair, un modèle pour l'Europe? is a different author with the same name. (website)

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

Inspired by reading Edmund Wilson's 1920s diaries during lockdown, Crowley set out to retrospectively create his own diaries from another better decade, right down to also taking on the role of Wilson's editor and annotating himself, sometimes sceptically, in italics. The sixties and the changes they wrought - or failed to - suffuse my favourite Crowley, the Aegypt quartet, and reading this I got a fuller sense of why; unlike the many who nominally lived through these years but were stranded in places where they wouldn't get a whiff of 'the sixties' until years later, and by then in dilute form, Crowley was in New York, and working for a time as a photographer, meaning encounters with musicians, models, the Warhol set, as well as dope and marches... all the boxes on the decade's checklist, really. Hindsight obviously helps, but you can see the times changing around him; his girlfriend applies for a job at the UN, is worried living in sin might count against her; not only does she get the gig, but when she needs a pre-legalisation abortion, her boss is the one who knows where to send her. This is the third volume I've read of the Conway Miscellany, and while the dream journal and the writing talks were fine, they were very much inessential Crowley. This, though, this has the magic I expect from him, even if - much like the sixties - I'm not sure it sticks the landing.