The BURIED Book Club discussion

John Sanford is a thoroughly neglected American author who was blacklisted(along with his wife who was a screenwriter) during the McCarthy period for being a communist. He wrote fiction early on and then transitioned into a number of hard to classify meditative works on American history and many different volumes of biography. These all seem to be experimental to various degrees. Not all of his works are on goodreads, or even online very much at all, his first novel in particular is a rare book that seems to have never been reprinted. Some of his books are still in print though - black sparrow press have published a few of the more recent non fictional works, and a few others are available as ebooks from bloomsbury publishing.

The People from Heaven seems to generally be considered his best novel, and is actually in print. I can't find much information on many of the early books, so I don't know if they're all experimental to the same degree.
Someone, I think his literary executor, maintains a website that has a complete bibliography as well as quite a bit of general info here: http://psych.fullerton.edu/jmearns/sa...

Here is an obituary that has quite a bit of useful info: http://articles.latimes.com/2003/mar/...

I have volume 5 of his autobiography in hand thanks to the local second hand bookshop, and I'm going to read it shortly and will report back.

I read The Season, It Was Winter: Scenes from the Life of an American Jew and I liked it quite a bit, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The best parts are the historical prose pieces and there's several whole books of those which sound more appealing to me than the rest of the autobiography. The novels also sound kind of interesting but seem hard to find.
One thing I didn't mention in the review is that Sanford reproduces some reviews of one of his earlier books verbatim in the biography. Most of them praise his use of language and prose style but aren't always happy with other elements of the book - sounds like a few other buried authors.

That's great news, I've liked all the later Sanford I've read a lot and iirc he says somewhere that The Water Wheel is the most experimental of all of his books.

I just launched a Kickstarter for the first-ever reissue of the rare 1933 avant-garde debut novel THE WATER WHEEL by Julian L. Shapiro (a.k.a. John Sanford).

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...

From the original edition's dust jacket: "In form, The Water Wheel has no counterpart in American letters. It deliberately avoids the traditional, but its objectives are always clarity and simplicity. The many technical and typographical innovations are designed to suit the subject matter, and are not fake-modern tricks."