Vance Nye Bourjaily

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > American Literature: Biographies

Bourjaily, Vance [Nye] (1922–), Ohio‐born writer, after service in World War II wrote The End of My Life (1947), a novel about a young man's collapse in the war, and The Hound of Earth (1954), about a scientist who runs away from his army job and his family after the bombing of Hiroshima. Bourjaily then became the editor of discovery, a distinguished departure in little magazines, and after its demise returned to fiction, writing The Violated (1958), a long novel of character analysis; Confessions of a Spent Youth (1960), about a young man's life and loves before, during, and after World War II; The Man Who Knew Kennedy (1967), treating the era of the President; Brill Among the Ruins (1970), depicting sociocultural turmoil of the 1960s as it affects a middle‐aged man; Now Playing at Canterbury (1976), a kind of Canterbury Tales set in the U.S. of the '60s and '70s; A Game Men Play (1980), a panoramic social history and adventure tale of the 20th cen‐tury; and The Great Fake Book (1987), about a man learning of the life of his father through various means, including a pen‐and‐ink private memoir. Old Soldier (1990) is a fictional account of fishing in Maine. The Unnatural Enemy (1963) and Country Matters (1973) are nonfictional works about rural life.