Author wrote about seekers and doubters
SANTA FE, N.M. — Evan S. Connell, an acclaimed and adventurous author, whose literary explorations ranged from Depression-era Kansas City in the twin novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge to Custer’s last stand in the history book Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn, was found dead Thursday, his niece said. He was 88.
Connell was discovered at his Santa Fe apartment and probably died of old age, said Donna Waller of Hilton Head Island, S.C.
Little known to the general public, but regarded fondly by critics, Connell was a National Book award finalist, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a finalist in 2009 for the International Man Booker Award for lifetime achievement.
Connell was the author of 19 books, including two book-length poems, a biography of Spanish painter Francisco Goya and a historically detailed novel about the Crusades, Deus Lo Volt!
He wrote often of seekers and doubters, world travellers through the ages and conventional folks who secretly yearned to break out.
The author himself was blessed with a curious and unpredictable mind, his subjects including alchemy, Antarctica, Nordic tales, Marco Polo, Mayan sculpture and the quest for gold in the New World.
In Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, Connell’s narrative was a series of vignettes — some just a few paragraphs — that offer a portrait of the prewar lives of Walter Bridge, a workaholic lawyer, and his wife, India, who reside in the fashionable country club district of Kansas City.
While the Bridges each are respected members of their class — and respectability is the dearest of goals — Connell also writes of their inner doubts about their marriage, their religious faith and the meaning of their lives.
As much as any work by a writer of Connell’s generation, these two novels are likely to live on as classics in our literature, wrote Gerald Shapiro in a 1987 edition of the literary journal Ploughshares.
Connell “was a trailblazer, a troubadour, one of the first to put the literary scalpel to the suburban skin,” Greg Bottoms wrote on Salon.com in 2000 in describing the Bridge novels.
His most recent book was a collection of short stories published in 2008, Lost in Uttar Pradesh.
He began writing while attending Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He left in 1943 to enlist in the navy, becoming a pilot and flight instructor. After the war, he returned to college and graduated from the University of Kansas in 1947 with a degree in English literature.
He studied creative writing at Stanford and Columbia universities, but unlike many authors he never taught, saying that campus life was too comfortable.