Stephen Becker

David Adams, at Open Road Books, is bringing out ten titles written by Stephen Becker, who was my favorite teacher at the Iowa Writers Workshop.  You might pick up some of these if you're unfamiliar with them.

The Season of The Stranger
Juice
A Covenant With Death
The Outcasts
When the War Is Over
Dog Tags
The Chinese Bandit
The Last Mandarin
The Blue-Eyed Shan
A Rendezvous in Haiti



I wrote to him:


At the Iowa Writers Workshop we neophytes worked with more than a dozen of the finest writers a generation or two older than us, and among all those luminaries Stephen Becker stands out as the one who wrote actual stories for actual readers.  Steve was impressive in his intellectual gifts and the breadth of his experience with the real world -- but he wasn't out to impress anybody.  More accurately, he said that a writer, or any artist, should want to accomplish four things with his work -- educate, impress, edify, and entertain.  An artist can make a living, he said, by doing any one of those four.  A good artist does at least two.  A master, like Becker himself, can do all four, and well.



Joe Haldeman