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The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve. Volume 3. Born 27 Jan Died 3 Jul Activity During this period, he also worked as a reporter on a part-time basis for the Montreal Herald. We respect your email privacy. Kindle Ebook Deal of the Day! Latest Deals:. Ebook Deal of the Day!
Edna St. Vincent Millay — Five of our Favorite Poems! Christopher Smith:. Richler died of cancer on July 3, , in Montreal, aged He was also a second cousin of novelist Nancy Richler. In the late s and early s, he authored a monthly book review for Gentlemen's Quarterly. Richler was often critical of Quebec but of Canadian federalism as well.
Another favourite Richler target was the government-subsidized Canadian literary movement of the s and s. Journalism constituted an important part of his career, bringing him income between novels and films. Richler published his fourth novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz , in The book featured a frequent Richler theme: Jewish life in the s and 40s in the neighbourhood of Montreal east of Mount Royal Park on and about St.
Richler wrote of the neighbourhood and its people, chronicling the hardships and disabilities they faced as a Jewish minority. To a middle-class stranger, it is true, one street would have seemed as squalid as the next. On each corner a cigar store, a grocery, and a fruit man. Outside staircases everywhere. Winding ones, wooden ones, rusty and risky ones.
Here a prized lot of grass splendidly barbered, there a spitefully weedy patch. An endless repetition of precious peeling balconies and waste lots making the occasional gap here and there. Following the publication of Duddy Kravitz , according to The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature , Richler became "one of the foremost writers of his generation".
Many critics distinguished Richler the author from Richler the polemicist. Richler frequently said his goal was to be an honest witness to his time and place, and to write at least one book that would be read after his death. His work was championed by journalists Robert Fulford and Peter Gzowski , among others. Critics cited his repeated themes, including incorporating elements of his journalism into later novels.
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz has been performed on film and in several live theatre productions in Canada and the United States. Richler's most frequent conflicts were with members of the Quebec nationalist movement. In articles published between the late s and the mids, Richler criticized Quebec's restrictive language laws and the rise of sovereigntism.
Lament for a divided country" in the Atlantic Monthly to considerable controversy. Richler also apologized for the incident and called it an "embarrassing gaffe". In Richler published Oh Canada! Oh Canada! Nadia Khouri believes that there was a discriminatory undertone in the reaction to Richler, noting that some of his critics characterized him as "not one of us" [ 19 ] or that he was not a "real Quebecer".
Some commentators were alarmed about the strong controversy over Richler's book, saying that it underlines and acknowledges the persistence of anti-Semitism among sections of the Quebec population. His defenders believed this was evoking old stereotypes of Jews. When leaders of the Jewish community were asked to dissociate themselves from Richler, the journalist Frances Kraft said that indicated that they did not consider Richler as part of the Quebec "tribe" because he was Anglo-speaking and Jewish.
About the same time, Richler announced he had founded the "Impure Wool Society," to grant the Prix Parizeau to a distinguished non-Francophone writer of Quebec. In , Montreal city councillor Marvin Rotrand presented a 4,signature petition calling on the city to honour Richler on the 10th anniversary of his death with the renaming of a street, park or building in Richler's old Mile End neighbourhood.
The council initially denied an honour to Richler, saying it would sacrifice the heritage of their neighbourhood. For various reasons, the project stalled for several years but was completed in Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.
Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Among the most prominent figures in contemporary Canadian literature, Richler is best known for the darkly humorous novels in which he examines such topics as Canadian society, Jewish culture, the adverse effects of materialism, and relationships between individuals of different backgrounds.
Richler left Canada at the age of twenty and lived in Europe for more than twenty years; he usually set his fiction in the Jewish section of Montreal where he was raised, or in European locales. And indeed, it is surely no mistake that in a Europe longing to be reminded of the world before the massive cultural and physical trauma of the Holocaust and of World War II , Richler felt himself compelled to look back to his Jewish roots in Montreal.
Although Richler is sometimes faulted for excessive vulgarity and for being overly judgmental of both Canadian nationalism and Jewish culture, he is widely praised for his sense of humor and his skill at blending realism and satire. After a stint at a university, Richler cashed in an insurance policy and used the money to sail to Liverpool, England.
Eventually he found his way to Paris, where he spent some years emulating such expatriate authors as Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller , and later moved to London in , where he worked as a news correspondent. Urbain's Horseman , and Joshua, Then and Now These books share a common theme—that of a Jewish-Canadian protagonist at odds with society, a theme based loosely on Richler's own life—and all three novels revolve around the way greed can taint success.
The novels also reveal Richler's flair for dark humor and racy content. A Successful Comeback Novel After Joshua, Then and Now , nine years would pass before Richler published another novel although he was a widely published journalist throughout that period. When he broke the silence in with Solomon Gursky Was Here , several reviewers welcomed the novel as worth the wait, and England's Book Trust honored it with a Commonwealth Writers Prize.
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Children's Books and Final Novel Richler introduced his children's book hero Jacob Two-Two so called because, as the youngest of five children, he has to say everything twice to be heard in with Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang. Jacob was based on Richler's own youngest son Jacob Richler. Two years later he published his last novel for adults: Barney's Version.
The book won that year's Giller Prize. Richler died in of complications resulting from cancer. Philip Roth — : An American novelist whose work has both been highly praised and condemned as anti-Semitic, despite the fact that Roth himself is Jewish. Seamus Heaney — : The Nobel Prize —winning Irish poet who translated Beowulf into contemporary English and received much acclaim for making the work accessible to modern readers.
Margaret Thatcher — : The first female prime minister of the United Kingdom, Thatcher served in office from until Martin Luther King Jr. The first three novels, The Acrobats , Son of a Smaller Hero , and A Choice of Enemies , are realistic, their plots basically traditional in form, their settings accurately detailed, and their characters motivated in psychologically familiar ways.
Even in these works, as George Woodcock has noted, there is at times a drift toward satiric caricature. At the other extreme, The Incomparable Atuk and Cocksure are pure satiric fantasy along the lines of Voltaire's long-celebrated Candide, or Optimism , their concessions to realism slight. In them Richler indulges the strong comic vein in his writing as he attacks Canadian provincialism and the spurious gratifications of the entertainment media.
Urbain's Horseman and in Joshua, Then and Now , the two strands of realism and fantasy-satire come together, and this distinctive blend becomes Richler's greatest narrative strength. In these highly satirical and highly fantastical novels, Richler's work is in the same vein as his contemporaries Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon , and such later writers as David Foster Wallace.
Although Richler's early work received mixed critical responses—particularly his works of satire—his later work has received almost universal acclaim. Both the early and the late fiction tend to revolve around protagonists on moral quests of one sort or another. Nonetheless, Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz remains his best-known and most highly regarded work.
Lawrence's Sons and Lovers , A. Like the society from which it springs, this tends to be close and exclusive, clinging together in spite of its intense quarrels. The best aspect of such clannishness, the feeling of kinship which transcends all personal differences, is exemplified by Duddy. Although he is in varying degrees put down and rejected by all of his relatives except his grandfather, Duddy sticks up for them and protects them.
Gursky, who came from a prominent Jewish-Canadian family of liquor distillers, may have died years ago in a plane crash, but Berger finds numerous clues that suggest he lived on in various guises, a trickster and meddler in international affairs. Other critics have suggested that there was too much going on in the novel, and that some its humor seemed a bit too black.
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One of the primary targets of Richler's satire was the entertainment industry. Here is a selection of other works that take aim at the entertainment world:. For Your Consideration , a film directed by Christopher Guest. Ultimately, viewers understand how scheming and selfish the characters are. The Truman Show , a film directed by Peter Weir.
Biography of john f. kennedy: Mordecai Richler CC (January 27, – July 3, ) was a Canadian writer. His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz () and Barney's Version (). His novel St. Urbain's Horseman and novel Solomon Gursky Was Here were nominated for the Booker Prize.
The protagonist of this film, Truman, is a man whose whole life from the time of his conception onward has been the center of a reality television show. But Truman is unaware that he is being filmed and that his friends and family are actors in the drama. Network , a film directed by Sidney Lumet. This highly acclaimed satire demonstrates the depths to which a fictional network will sink in order to improve ratings.
The film won four Academy Awards. Klinck, Carl F. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Northey, Margot. One of Canada's most accomplished writers, Mordecai Richler produced screenplays, novels, children's literature, and essays.
At the time of his death, he was acknowledged as Canada's leading curmudgeon for his witty insights on topics such as the Canadian personality and the foibles of Quebec separatism. Mordecai Richler was a prominent figure on the Canadian literary landscape for more than 40 years after the publication of his breakthrough novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.
Richler was much more than just a popular novelist, however; as a prolific contributor to magazines, movies, and children's literature, Richler probably reached a broader audience than any contemporary Canadian writer. His blunt words on Canadian political affairs also made Richler a household name throughout the country, particularly for his unsparing criticism of the ongoing battles over Quebec sovereignty.
His description of the conflict as "Canada's longest running opera bouffe, a far from life-and-death struggle over the size of English lettering and outdoor commercial signs in Montreal," in a Stanley Knowles Lecture at the University of Waterloo was just a sampling of Richler's disdain for the separatist forces in his native province.
Richler's grandfather, a rabbinical scholar, emigrated to Montreal in from Galicia, a region then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today split between Poland and the Ukraine. Establishing a scrapyard, the elder Richler gradually built the concern into a successful business that employed some of his fourteen children.
Moses Isaac Richler, the eldest of the Richler sons, followed his father into the family business; however, unlike his younger brother, Solly, he was never made a full partner. Moses Richler's failure to achieve as much as his siblings was later explored in the writings of his son, Mordecai Richler, who was born on January 27, Urbain Street; at one time, three generations of the family lived across the street from one another.
Richler later immortalized the area in his novel St. Urbain's Horseman as a lively, nurturing place despite the economic hardships that many of the residents faced.
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At home, however, the young Richler was witness to his parents' increasingly unhappy marriage, which he attributed to his father's passive nature. In , his mother, Lily Richler, had the marriage annulled on the grounds that she had been an underage bride and had married without her parents' consent; although Richler and his older brother were then adolescents, the annulment was granted.
Richler was encouraged in his religious studies at a Jewish parochial school ; his parents hoped that he might become a rabbi. Even though Richler's Jewish roots remained central to his identity for the rest of his life, he abandoned most of the Orthodox practices that he had been taught. His greatest rebellion, however, occurred when he abandoned his course work at Sir George Williams College today known as Concordia University after his second year.
Richler was uninspired by his studies and longed to break free of his provincial life and pursue a career as a writer. In , after a brief stint on the staff of the Montreal Herald, Richler began traveling in Europe and eventually spent an extended time in Paris, where he published his first piece of fiction, "Shades of Darkness Three Impressions " in the literary magazine Points.
Encouraged by this early success, Richler also worked on the manuscript for a novel, The Acrobats, about a wandering Canadian idealist inspired by the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. With his pockets empty, Richler returned to Montreal in while his first manuscript made the rounds of several European publishing houses.
Mordecai richler biography of abraham lincoln
He worked as both a salesman and as a radio editor for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation while he revised The Acrobats following its conditional acceptance by a British publisher. In , the book finally was published. It received fairly good reviews, but sold only about copies in its first few years in print in Canada.
As Richler recalled in his debut essay in reprinted in commemoration of his death in in Maclean's, a Canadian news magazine, "My last royalty statement from New York cost me a good deal of sleep. It covered the last six months in , and in that period two copies of The Acrobats had been sold. One domestic and the other Orient. For nights, I was kept awake thinking, 'Who in the hell do I know in the Orient?
Would it be possible to trace the buyer? Shouldn't we correspond? Or did he, perhaps, buy the book in error? Richler returned to Europe to take up life as an expatriate writer in London. An early marriage ended in divorce, but his second marriage in , to onetime couture fashion model Florence Wood, lasted until his death; they had three sons and two daughters.
After two more novels that received fairly positive critical notices, yet disappointing sales figures— Son of a Smaller Hero in and A Choice of Enemies in —Richler published a breakthrough work, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, in Set in Montreal, the novel explored the rise of an ambitious young Jewish man determined to be successful; praised by critics, the book eventually became part of the modern canon of Canadian literature.
Richler also established his reputation as a screenwriter for television and film during this period; perhaps his best-known early contribution was his uncredited work on the classic British film on class conflict, Room at the Top and his acknowledged work on its sequel, Life at the Top. Demonstrating his versatility as a novelist, Richler published two works of humorous fiction, The Incomparable Atuk distributed in the United States as Stick Your Neck Out in and Cocksure in Both works used fish-out-of-water protagonists to illuminate larger observations about contemporary society, particularly the pretensions of the academic and artistic elites.
Together with a collection of essays, Hunting Tigers Under Glass, Cocksure received the Governor General's Award in , one of the highest honors bestowed by the Canadian government. Richler continued his string of successes with the publication of St. Urbain's Horsemen, which again received the Governor General's Award. A novel that included more autobiographical elements than any of his other fictional works, St.
Urbain's Horsemen followed the life of an expatriate Canadian living in London as he made sense of his life in middle age.