Chandler Brossard was a journalist turned novelist that wrote books that were very successful in Britain and France, however not in the United States. His career started off as a paper boy at age 18, and would be hired by the New Yorker as a reporter one year later. Following advice from an editor within the New Yorker, Brossard would later experiment with fiction when he released his first novel, Who walk in Darkness in 1952. However, everyone who read it didn’t take it as fiction. However as Brossard says himself; “They thought it was a realistic novel, which of course it wasn’t. The French critics knew better. They perceived it as the first new wave novel”. Which is why he would continue to appeal to the French and British audience more than the American audience. Brossard would receive close to no recognition for his work in the United States mostly because he had an “unconventional style and characters”. Brossard would use characters who were typically seen as outcasts, but also used spoken voice and idiomatic language. Despite the little success in his homeland, Brossard would go on to publish
- The Bold Saboteurs (1953; reprint 2001, with introduction by Steven Moore)
- All Passion Spent (1954)
- The Wrong Turn (1954), pseudo. Daniel Harper
- The Double View (1960), pseudo. Daniel Harper
- Episode with Erika (1963)
- The Nymphets (1963), pseudo. Daniel Harper
- A Man for All Women (1966)
- I Want More of This (1967)
- Wake Up. We’re Almost There (1971)
- Did Christ Make Love? (1973)
- Dirty Books for Little Folks (1978)
- Raging Joys, Sublime Violations (1981)
- A Chimney Sweep Comes Clean (1985)
- Closing the Gap(1987)[2]
- As the Wolf Howls at My Door (1992),
If I were to interview Chandler Brossard, I would definitely bring up how he went from writing factual, every day newspaper entries, to completely made up fictional stories. It would surely be a huge decision that Brossard had to make, but I wonder just how challenging adjusting would be. Brossard knows that his style of multiple perspectives and voices is unique and never seen before, at least in the United States, so I would ask him how he came up with that particular style and why he chose to stick with it despite the rocky feedback in the beginning. Brossard likes to write a lot about outsiders of society such as thieves and harlots. I would be curious as to why he would stick those types of characters rather than switching it up all the time. Brossard does say that he chooses characters that are outcasts because the people that took him in where also those “odd people”, and it is comfortable to write about such characters, so I would ask if that meant that certain plots in his novels could possibly be renditions of scenarios/stories that he went through with those same people.