Description
Book SynopsisDreamer's Journey: The Life and Writings of Frederic Prokosch is the first comprehensive study of the enigmatic, erratically brilliant novelist and poet. It explores his published and unpublished writings, his troubled personal life, the conflicts arising from his homosexuality, his wanderings as a kind of permanent expatriate, and his preoccupation with reinventing his persona and creating an imaginary and highly dramatic past for himself. An expert dissembler, much in Prokosch's life was false and theatrical. His activities as a forger interweave with a long history of lies and deceptions. Most of Voices: A Memoir, his last published work, is pure fantasy and part of an elaborate hoax. Self-deluding, he succumbed at times to the persuasiveness of his own fictions. Dreamer's Journey presents the story of an immensely gifted writer, "a sort of Berlioz in prose," who found himself unable to live at the level of his dreams.
Trade ReviewGreenfield, an author of articles on Lionel Trilling, Ludwig Lewisohn, and Charles Horton Colley, discusses the life and writings of American poet and novelist Frederic Prokosch (1908-1989), who strove to conceal his real life and self from the world. Greenfield draws on archives and interviews with family members, classmates, editors, publishers, colleagues, and lovers to separate Prokosch's real life from the fictions he created, discussing his life from his childhood to death, the connection between his creative process and his penchant for lies and disguises, and his works, which he saw as extensions of his life, like , , and his fictitious memoir . He also addresses his homosexuality and his forgery of the 'Butterfly Books.' * Book News, Inc. *
Dreamer's Journey offers a fascinating insight into the life and work of this unusual, creative artist…. Dreamer's Journey is a tremendous work of research, offering sympathetic insight into a gifted, complicated author who created in his work a world to match his odd temperament. * Gay and Lesbian Review *
