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Joseph McElroy
Born
(1930-08-21) August 21, 1930 (age 93) New York City, U.S.
Joseph Prince McElroy[1] (born August 21, 1930) is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.[2] He is noted for his long postmodern novels such as Women and Men.
In 1961, McElroy married Joan Leftwich, of London, in London. She is the daughter of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews; her father,
Joseph Leftwich, was a translator and anthologizer of Yiddish poetry.[5] The McElroys' only child, Hanna, was born in 1967. McElroy assisted with the birth.[4]
Career
McElroy taught English and Creative Writing at the
University of New Hampshire from 1956 to 1962[4] and at
Queens College, City University of New York from 1964 to 1995, when he retired. McElroy's first novel, A Smuggler's Bible, was published in 1966. McElroy said A Smuggler's Bible "is like everybody's first novel, trying to put too much between covers. ...[I]t's a young book, and young people still seem to like it."[6]
McElroy's writing is often grouped with that of
William Gaddis and
Thomas Pynchon, due to the encyclopedic quality of his novels, especially Women and Men (1987). His short fiction was first published in literary journals. Echoes of McElroy's work can be found in that of
Don DeLillo and
David Foster Wallace. McElroy's work often reflects a preoccupation with how science functions in American society;[7]Exponential, a collection of essays published in Italy in 2003, collects science and technology journalism written primarily in the 1970s and 1980s for the New York Review of Books.[8]
In 1980, McElroy and his class at Queens College interviewed
Norman Mailer.[9][10] He interviewed
Harry Mathews in 2002 for the Village Voice.[11] McElroy wrote about his fiction and influences in his essay "Neural Neighborhoods".[12]