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Mrs bridge evan connell5/22/2023 Early versions of my book focused almost entirely on my older brother, Scott, a self-destructive oddball who was, after all, the person most like me in the world-and this, I gradually learned, was very much to the point. Until then, I’d considered Yates’s novel The Easter Parade (1976) to be pretty much the last word on middle-class American families-I shared his pessimism on the subject, suffice it to say-though a decade would pass before I became Yates’s biographer and then, a little later, began writing my own account of family life, The Splendid Things We Planned. I discovered the Bridge novels one day in 1991 at the Full Circle Bookstore in my hometown of Oklahoma City. Bridge is better, I think, than all but ten or fifteen American novels written in the postwar era-would suggest that Yates was onto something, at least where he and Connell were concerned. That the Bridge novels are so clearly superior to Connell’s other books-and Mrs. Bridge (1969), he also wrote a fascinating account of General Custer, along with a lot of other nonfiction, poetry, and an odd assortment of novels and short stories that might have been written by five or six different authors. Connell might have disagreed: Though he wrote two masterpieces about family life in midcentury America, Mrs. “That’s all there is to write about,” Yates replied. “ALL I WRITE ABOUT IS FAMILY ,” Elizabeth Cox once remarked to Richard Yates, who had helped her with her first novel.
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