In thirty years, he published only a handful of stories in the New Yorker, Esquire and the (now defunct) American Review, collected in the volumes First Love and other Sorrows, published in 1957, Women and Angels, published in 1985 and Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, published in 1988 - a sort of greatest hits of Harold Brodkey.
For decades the public awaited the arrival of the magnum opus he titled “Party of Animals,” contenting themselves with rumors and leaked portions of the manuscript that were published as short stories, while Brodkey cultivated an air of genius born of anticipation. His great work, a novel that was widely speculated (by Brodkey as well as his fans) to be a masterpiece, was a perpetual work in progress.
When, in 1953, Harold Brodkey arrived on the literary scene with his first published story for the New Yorker, “State of Grace,” he was almost immediately hailed as the latest in a line of great modernist writers in the tradition of William Faulkner and James Joyce–a talent on a par with the best writers of his generation.
