Chandler Brossard

Chandler Brossard (1922–1993) was an American novelist, editor, playwright, and poet. Born in Idaho Falls, Idaho, he grew up in Washington, DC, where he left school at an early age and educated himself by reading the literary classics. At eighteen, he was hired by the Washington Post as a copy boy. He became a reporter and moved to New York City, where he wrote for the New Yorker and held senior editorial positions at Time, Coronet, the American Mercury, and Look magazine. Encouraged to write fiction by the New Yorker editor William Shawn, Brossard published his debut novel, Who Walk in Darkness, in 1952. Set in contemporary Greenwich Village, it is considered by many to be the first Beat novel, although Brossard rejected that categorization. Over the course of a forty-year career, he wrote or edited seventeen books, including the groundbreaking novels The Bold Saboteurs (1953) and The Double View (1960), and taught at numerous universities in the United States and abroad, among them SUNY College at Old Westbury on Long Island, the University of Birmingham in England, the New School for Social Research in New York City, and Schiller International University in Paris.