Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey, an American short-story writer and novelist, became known for detailed accounts of memory, family, and self-consciousness. First Love and Other Sorrows was his first book, issued by the Dial Press in 1957. These nine stories, most of which had first run in The New Yorker, follow children, college students, couples, and young parents confronting attachment and disappointment. Pieces including The State of Grace, The Quarrel, Sentimental Education, and the title story establish the suburban and Midwestern settings that recur across his writing. A Vintage edition later returned the collection to print within the Vintage Contemporaries line. Brodkey studied at Harvard and remained associated with The New Yorker for much of his career. After a long interval between books, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode gathered later work in 1988, followed by the novel The Runaway Soul. First Love and Other Sorrows remains the clearest starting point for tracing how his early realism developed into a more elaborate investigation of consciousness and recollection.