Talk:George V. Higgins

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Untitled[edit]

I feel that George V. Higgins's book "On Writing" should be mentioned in the article on Higgins, and I intend to fill out the article a little.

Andrew Szanton, 5/06

14 destroyed novels, what?[edit]

It says

Higgins once wrote: "The success of The Friends of Eddie Coyle was termed 'overnight' in some quarters; that was one hell of a damned long night, lasting seventeen years..." During those 17 years, he had written 14 previous novels; he eventually destroyed them.

Friends of Eddie Coyle is listed as his first work, so he wrote 14 novels in the 17 years before that, and destroyed the manuscripts? He must have tried to have them published, as he later wrote

If you do not seek to publish what you have written, then you are not a writer and you never will be.

So then, couple things:

1) If I'm figuring it right, it should say "...he eventually destroyed the unpublished manuscripts" for clarity. I'm not making the change cos I'm not 100% this is what is meant. But its very confusing for the reader.

2) This is really extraordinary. I have not heard of a case remotely like this -- 17 years, 14 novels rejected by all publishers, kept writing them anyway. His (published) writing is highly praised, so how bad could the 14 have been? He had the means and intelligence to hire a literary agent, did he, and if he didn't why not. Then he hit it big with Friends and was a successful and well reviewed author, sitting a gold mine, but he didn't cash in, nor even try to salvage some of them with editing, nor even keep them in a trunk for future people to look over (he was, after all, a professor, so you'd think he wouldn't be super inclined to destroy source materials). He admitted that he burned the 14, did he ever say why?

What's the deal? The reader is left hanging. Surely there must be source material somewhere to describe what happened and why. I mean it is quite extraordinary, worth of a paragraph at least. Herostratus (talk) 16:40, 9 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]