9-05-08 Week Two Issues and Arguments Fiction

We had class today and Prof. Row explained the chronological movements of writers in American from 1900 to now, which I was absolutely delighted to learn. I’m going on five years of undergraduate Literature classes and no Professor has ever explained the movements of fiction in such a comprehendible way, it was an accessible and informative history. I keep thinking about my father, J.D. Reed, in this class, who was a writer in the seventies and eighties; he published a book of poems and some fiction. Although his first book of poetry won a Guggenheim he was never a literary superstar (he taught creative writing at Amherst before moving to SI, Time, and People) but he was friends with some “real” authors. When he and my mother lived in Montana he was in a circle of Alcoholic writers like Jim Harrison and others whose names I forget.
My family has an odd relationship to the writing world, the popular eighties novel The Sports Writer was based on my family. I’ve never read the book and never will because Richard Ford who wrote it used my Dad’s friendship for material and presented my parents in a not too good light. And later my sister Alicia looking down for her cigarette lighter crashed her car into Joyce Carol Oates pulling out of her driveway. My family dislikes Oates because, well, she’s not a very good writer, but more importantly she was very difficult in the trial.
Anyway now that I’ve shared to much personal info I will return to my original question. What I’ve been wondering in this class is where my father, or the more-famous writers in his circle, fit in the movements you discussed. He was born in the forties and came of age in the era during and right after World War Two so maybe he would be considered post-modern. My mother, who also published some (not-too-good) fiction, always says my Dad and his friends all wanted to be Hemingway and all their poems were about food and sex, so who knows.