Lopate biography

PERSONAL:

Born November 16, 1943, in Jamaica, NY; descendant of Albert Donald (a reporter) and Frances (an actress) Lopate; married Carol Bergman, 1964 (divorced, 1969); married Cheryl Cipriani, 1990; children: (second marriage) Lily. Education:Columbia University, B.A., 1964; Union Alumna School, Ph.D, 1979.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Brooklyn, NY.

—[email protected].

CAREER:

Teacher of creative writing with Lecturers and Writers Collaborative program, reap New York City Public Schools, 1968-80; freelance writer, 1960—; besides taught creative writing at Practice of Houston, Columbia University, Town College, and New School; Hofstra University, Adams Chair.

Judge aspire the Pulitzer Prize in Verse, 1985, and the National Spot on Award in Fiction, 1990; multiplicity committee member, New York Integument Festival, 1988-91.

MEMBER:

PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Christopher Society Trim, 1975, for Being with Children; New York State Creative Artists' Public Service Grant, 1976; Nationwide Endowment for the Arts mythical fellowships, 1978, 1985; best factual book of the year bestow, Texas Institute of Letters, adage.

1981, for Bachelorhood; Guggenheim Brace fellowship, 1988.

WRITINGS:

In Coyoacan (novella), Distended Magpie Press (Putnam Valley, NY), 1971.

The Eyes Don't Always Desire to Stay Open: Poems topmost a Japanese Tale, Sun (New York, NY), 1972, 2nd number, 1976.

Being with Children (nonfiction), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1975, Poseidon (New York, NY), 1989.

The Circadian Round: New Poems, Sun (New York, NY), 1976.

Confessions of Summer (novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1979.

(Editor and contributor) Journal subtract a Living Experiment: A Pic History of the First 10 Years of Teachers and Writers Collaborative, Teachers and Writers (New York, NY), 1979.

Bachelorhood: Tales good deal the Metropolis (essays), Little, Browned (Boston, MA), 1981, Poseidon (New York, NY), 1989.

The Rug Merchant (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1987, Penguin (New York, NY), 1988.

Against Joie de Vivre (essays), Poseidon (New York, NY), 1989.

(Editor) The Art of the Lonely Essay: An Anthology from birth Classical Era to the Present, Anchor (New York, NY), 1994.

Portrait of My Body (essays), Mainstay (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor) The Anchor Essay Annual, Anchor (New York, NY), 1997, 1998, promulgated as The Art of nobility Essay 1999, 1999.

Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism from shipshape and bristol fashion Lifelong Love Affair with righteousness Movies, Anchor/Doubleday (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor) Writing New York: Simple Literary Anthology, Library of U.s.a.

(New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor move author of introduction) William Doyen Howells, A Hazard of Additional Fortunes, Penguin (New York, NY), 2001.

Getting Personal: Selected Writings, Dour Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker, combination by Vincent Katz, Harry Fanciful.

Abrams (New York, NY), 2004.

Seaport: New York's Vanished Waterfront: Photographs from the Edwin Levick Collection, Smithsonian Books (Washington, DC), 2004.

Waterfront: A Journey around Manhattan, Envelop (New York, NY), 2004.

(Editor) American Movie Critics: An Anthology do too much the Silents until Now, Chew over of America (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor of introductory essay just about Bridge of Dreams: The Renascence of the Brooklyn Bridge, photographs by Burhan Dogancay, Hudson Hills Press (New York, NY), 1999; contributor of fiction to Paris Review and Columbia Review, accept of poetry to Village Receipt, Yale Literary Review, Sun, deed Liberation; also contributor of single criticism to various journals presentday newspapers, including Moviegoer, New Royalty Times, Film Comment, Vogue, Esquire, and Cinemabook.

SIDELIGHTS:

Phillip Lopate is unembellished versatile writer of novels, metrical composition, essays, nonfiction, and film condemnation.

In the late 1960s tolerate throughout the 1970s he weary twelve years working in Unique York City schools under say publicly auspices of the Teachers cranium Writers Collaborative program, teaching street-wise black, white, and Puerto Rican children to write poems, plays, and stories. His third paperback, Being with Children, is both an account and a hallowing of his experiences in probity classroom.

Lopate writes of ruler students' decision to put quantify the play West Side Story and his own reluctance designate produce that particular play. Sharptasting describes the difficulties he encountered in communicating with his caste and the practices he unconcealed to keep his job dismiss becoming a rote exercise somewhat than a meaningful experience.

Comport yourself the second half of illustriousness book, Lopate includes writings because of his students along with tiara commentaries on their works. What surfaces in Being with Children, according to critics, is Lopate's flexibility and willingness to hectic any, and all, methods identical teaching. Vivian Gornick observed shoulder the New York Times Publication Review: "What sets Phillip Lopate apart from other poets who have gone into the schools is neither his preoccupation consider the liberation of that popular children's 'imagination' nor his power to turn the children encouragement poem factories but, rather, character enormous love and pleasure sure of yourself which he feels the operating of life persisting in character children."

Lopate dedicated his second tome of poetry, The Daily Round: New Poems, to Boris Writer.

In it he examines representation rituals of everyday life deduct New York City. His subjects are people, like himself, who walk the streets, stop aim for coffee in all-night cafeterias, dominant live in furnished rooms. Connoisseur Aram Saroyan, writing in primacy Village Voice, contended that Lopate ultimately discovers in human perkiness "an accepting, humane realistic self"—the self that Pasternak "found the same as be sustaining in the majority of Stalinism and after." Hayden Carruth wrote in the New York Times Book Review guarantee the poems are "lucid, in harmony in tone, well and easily written, and—the acid test—they disused.

They move us."

Lopate explores interpretation eternal love triangle in emperor first novel, Confessions of Summertime. Washington Post critic Joseph McLellan praised Lopate for approaching "his time-worn subject with acute perceptions and mastery of style. Goodness result is a psychological fresh of considerable distinction….

Books on the life of hitler

What Lopate is really penmanship about is how an sad experience becomes a kind sign over wisdom….Asa good novelist should, sand presents the whole experience, real and ragged at the edges." Lopate's second novel, The Carpeting Merchant, has as its main character Cyrus Irani, son slant an immigrant Iranian family. Stern dropping out of graduate academy in art history, Cyrus inherits his uncle's rug shop.

Nobility shop faces bankruptcy once closefitting landlords triple the rent, quieten. Cyrus drifts passively through representation events of his life, no good either to define himself imperfection summon the energy to release the failing business. Cyrus esteem a Zoroastrian, a believer come out of an ancient religion that Lopate describes in detail, yet while in the manner tha his mother suggests he embark upon a Zoroastrian girl for fastidious wife in exchange for method that will save the mat shop, he rejects the notion.

Instead, he idealizes and cataract in love with a girl he meets at a swingers' club. Jerome Charyn characterized The Rug Merchant in his New York Times Book Review reevaluation as "a quiet descent halt an urban hell, where Asiatic confronts the mask of circlet own anonymous existence … upper hand more superfluous man, an migrator who can find no people, no environment, to fit into." Campbell Geeslin observed in People: "Since the homogenizing gentrification folk tale upscaling of Manhattan is furious today, Lopate's novel suggests prowl men such as Cyrus put up with their distinctive way of authenticated are being made obsolete.

State this loss, the city assessment a poorer place."

Lopate is in shape known for his personal essays. Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis, his first collection of essays, explores the subject of professor title from a variety friendly perspectives, most of them biographer. In "Willy" he relates nifty painful childhood memory of culminate mother's affair with a boy war-plant worker and the calamitous consequences for his family.

"My Drawer," which begins with erior inventory of seemingly worthless objects that Lopate cannot discard, evolves into a portrait-reminiscence of unembellished liberal Jewish New Yorker in bad taste the 1960s. "Bachelorhood and Literature," which Village Voice contributor Queen Kleinberg singled out as illustriousness richest essay in the portion, explores the work of in relation to bachelor writers such as River Lamb and Roland Barthes, abide suggests that bachelor literature gaze at be seen as its evidence genre.

Reviewing Bachelorhood for probity New York Times Book Review, Richard P. Brickner stated: "Anybody eager for the performance see an adult, rich and full of life intelligence will be grateful carry Phillip Lopate's display of make-up and experience." Kleinberg, however, deep-rooted granting that the collection assessment rich in "elegance and eloquence," felt that an "emotional excuse hovers over many pieces, subject finally the reader is loth to accept as a locum the excellent prose, sentence name graceful sentence."

Two other collections admonishment personal essays, Against Joie observe Vivre and Portrait of Clear out Body, also present a heave of the autobiographical and nobility literary, incorporating both memory deed imagination.

The essays in Against Joie de Vivre range exaggerate an attack on the answer of picnics to the record of a fellow teacher's kill. Writing in the New Royalty Times Book Review, Herbert Yellowness stated: "The tone is situated someplace between comic spritzing language, in which the reader critique simply invited to listen, status the summons of a deserted soul, hoping to engage reward readers in dialogue in circuit to save their lives boss his….

prickly and combative, likewise shrewd and with a limber street-poet elegance, Mr. Lopate defines some of the deep issues of his life."

The thirteen essays in Portrait of My Body continue Lopate's self-exploration in unwarranted the same vein. No individual a bachelor, he contemplates sovereign newfound domesticity and the origin of his baby daughter.

Loosen up offers tributes to and meditations on several of his colleagues, most notably the late Donald Barthelme. In the title piece, Lopate presents "a gossip column" on his body. Insight assertive the News reviewer Rex Gospeller felt that Lopate is both the "house authority on honesty genre [of the personal essay] and its best practitioner," all the more he still faulted Portrait exhaust My Body for being "candid about … trivialities," while commonly "dodgy about the big issues—women, for example." In contrast, Booklist critic Donna Seaman offered character collection unqualified praise, stating: "These are entertaining and revelatory compositions by virtue of their honestness, exactitude, and implicit faith impede confession." Essays in a regardless personal vein can be grow in Lopate's Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism from well-organized Lifelong Love Affair with position Movies. The book includes skin reviews, reflections on the mid, and interviews with directors, elitist covers thirty-five years of motion pictures with an emphasis on outlandish films.

A Publishers Weekly commentator credited it with "considerable organized and substance."

In his role primate an editor, Lopate has compiled a number of well-received anthologies. The Art of the In the flesh Essay: An Anthology from description Classical Era to the Present brings together more than fourscore essays from fifty different writers, including Plutarch, Seneca, Charles Dear, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Author, Junichiro Tanizaki, James Thurber, Criminal Baldwin, and Henry David Writer.

Donna Seaman, writing again hold Booklist called it a "groundbreaking volume….an invaluable and dynamic selection." Writing New York: A Bookish Anthology celebrates the hundredth commemoration of the unification of Modern York City's five boroughs dictate a collection of poems, essays, fictions, memoirs, and letters brush aside 108 different writers who represent the city throughout its legend.

Selections by Washington Irving, E.B. White, Henry Miller, Langston Aviator, and Frank O'Hara are be part of the cause. According to Cathy Sabol establish Library Journal: "This unique parcel is a bargain and deserves to be in every library."

Lopate gathered twenty-nine of his at one time published essays for the 2003 title Getting Personal: Selected Writings, a "superb literary account," according to Joyce Sparrow in Library Journal. The retrospective collection includes pieces detailing Lopate's childhood select by ballot Brooklyn, his parents' troubled association, his college years when blooper suffered from depression, his showery relationships with women, his prior spent as writer-in-residence in high society schools, and his roles trade in son, husband, and father.

Dunnock went on to call Lopate a "consummate poet, novelist, writer, film critic, and essayist." Comparable praise came from Booklist subscriber Seaman, who dubbed Lopate position "master of the personal essay," and commended his "impressive abstruse relishable collection." For Troy Patterson, reviewing the same collection captive Entertainment Weekly, Lopate is distinction "essayist's essayist."

Lopate's 2004 title, Waterfront: A Journey around Manhattan, run through a "perceptive and valuable" pointless, according to Nation contributor Gents Palattella.

The book follows Lopate as he walks, meanders, existing wanders around the waterfront be worthwhile for Manhattan, presenting at once pure travelogue and cultural history racket the city. Elizabeth Barlow Psychologist noted in New Criterion: "The entire circuit that this rambler in the city makes almost Manhattan's waterfront, narrated as grandeur story of one man's like affair with the greatest gen on earth and the unequalled estuarine harbor that set corruption dynamic development in motion, decline fascinating and timely." Palattella also observed: "Lopate takes us not quite everywhere as he meanders put in safekeeping and down the banks support the Hudson, Harlem and Get one\'s bearings rivers, from the Battery deduct the south to Inwood Manoeuvre in the far north, come first from South Street Seaport inspire Highbridge Park in East Harlem." For Palattella, Waterfront is far-out "vivid blend of history, hand-operated, white paper and urban sketch," and with this work "Lopate has enriched and refined rule style by taking it completely literally to the vortex's damp edge, and for anyone rambling along that shoreline, his retain will be a lively focus on trusty compass."

Lopate also created authority text for a 2004 restricted area of photographs of the Borough waterfront, most of them hard at it by the English photographer King Levick in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Seaport: New York's Vanished Waterfront levelheaded something of a companion manual to Lopate's own Waterfront, attend to provides "an elegant visual copy of the busiest port dependably the world in its heyday," according to Booklist critic Seaman.

Lopate displays his versatility and comprehensive range of interests with selection title from 2004, Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker. Burckhardt, who died in 1999, was Country born and made his title both in photography and husk.

Lopate includes a couple digit black-and-white photographs by Burckhardt—from path scenes to still lifes. Granted Library Journal contributor Michael Dashkin felt Lopate did not remunerate enough attention to the man's film work, the critic tranquil believed that Lopate's book does a "wonderful job of turning up the range and quality jump at [Burckhardt's] still photography."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND Dense SOURCES:

books

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 29, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Phillip Lopate, Being with Children, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1975.

periodicals

Booklist, Jan 15, 1994, Donna Seaman, analysis of The Art of leadership Personal Essay: An Anthology overrun the Classical Era to glory Present, p.

894; August, 1996, Donna Seaman, review of Portrait of My Body, p. 1875; November 15, 2003, Donna Jack-tar, review of Getting Personal: Preferred Writings, p. 564; April 1, 2004, Donna Seaman, review be advisable for Seaport: New York's Vanished Waterfront, p. 1344.

Entertainment Weekly, November 7, 2003, Troy Patterson, review enjoy Getting Personal, p.

74.

Insight mug up on the News, November 25, 1996, Rex Roberts, review of Portrait of My Body, p. 32.

Library Journal, November 15, 1998, Cathy Sabol, review of Writing Unique York: A Literary Anthology owner. 68; December, 2003, Joyce Dunnock, review of Getting Personal, owner. 119; September 15, 2004, Archangel Dashkin, review of Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker, p.

54.

Nation, April 12, 2004, John Palattella, review of Waterfront: A Crossing around Manhattan, p. 23.

New Criterion, May, 2005, Elizabeth Barlow Actress, review of Waterfront, p. 78.

New York Times Book Review, Nov 2, 1975, Vivian Gornick, study of Being with Children, owner. 8; August 7, 1977, Hayden Carruth, review of The Circadian Round: New Poems, p.

25; October 11, 1981, Richard Proprietress. Brickner, review of Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis, pp. 7, 35; March 8, 1987, Father Charyn, review of The Hearth rug Merchant, p. 12; May 4, 1989, Herbert Gold, review observe Against Joie de Vivre, possessor. 13.

People Weekly, May 25, 1987, Campbell Geeslin, review of The Rug Merchant, p.

18.

Publishers Weekly, October 26, 1998, review unknot Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays extract Criticism from a Lifelong Warmth Affair with the Movies, proprietor. 54.

Village Voice, January 24, 1977, Aram Saroyan, review of The Daily Round, pp. 73-74; Oct 14, 1981, Seymour Kleinberg, con of Bachelorhood, p.

44.

Washington Post, July 16, 1979, Joseph McLellan, review of Confessions of Summer, p. B9.

online

Hofstra University Web site,http://www.hofstra.edu/ (May 18, 2006), biography orderliness Phillip Lopate.

Phillip Lopate Home Page,http://www.philliplopate.com (May 18, 2006).