About the Author

 

      Jack Saunders has been writing for 38 years without selling a word to New York or Hollywood, winning a grant, a writer-in-residence position, or a literary prize.  He is working on a 40-year roman-feuilleton, or saga-novel, that is too large for small presses to publish and too outspoken, freewheeling, and vulgar for the mainstream commercial houses.  A vernacular writer, he calls himself.  In the sense self-taught.  But also in the sense ambassador-in-bonds.  He shoots his leaflets into the void and presses on to Boulogne, like Tristram Shandy.  His stack now stands at 375 volumes, 376 roaring in his veins like a camphor injection.  The stopped-up toilet of American letters, fixing to erupt, like the Wakulla Volcano, or an explosion in a charnel house.  He calls his coterie of steadfast readers the Buzzard Cult, after the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a revitalization movement that swept the Lower Mississippi Valley just before and after European contact, and calls himself the salvage archeologist of the Mall Builder culture.  America’s greatest living unpublished, or underpublished writer, perhaps the greatest unpublished, or underpublished American writer ever.

 

 

Some Comments on Jack Saunders’ Work

 

 

Keep me on your mailing list.  Robert Gover

 

Jack Saunders is an American original and his life is an open book.  His dedication and commitment are evident throughout, and his abundant energy enlivens every page.  Lawrence Block

 

Nothing studied about this one.  He just knows.  And does.  It hangs together, flows together, makes a lot of sense.  Cooking like a Tasmanian Dervish.  All I can do is tip my hat.  Carl Weissner

 

Thank you for sending me EVIL GENIUS, which I read last night.  I didn't really want to stay up so late, but the book moved forward with a momentum that was overpowering and almost tragic.  Your fiction can also be very annoying--which is a virtue, I think.  Richard Grayson

 

I am very pleased at the way you handled the tale of your life in EVIL GENIUS.  It owes something to Henry Miller, but every writer owes a debt to those before them and those in turn were helped by their predecessors.  No one is an absolute original, but you come close.  William Eastlake

 

Thanks for the copy of Screed.  I liked it very much.  In fact, I've been reading it aloud to my wife in bed at night.  You write in a kind of natural, organic, free-flowing and perfectly lucid style that I much admire.  Edward Abbey

 

Dear Jack:   Thanks for Screed.  It's good diatribe.  The reason I know is that diatribe makes me feel better.  And I felt better reading it.  Walker Percy

 

Jack:   Got your book, Screed, this morning in the mail and just finished it tonight at 11:45.  Just before I read Screed, I'd been re-reading Somerset Maugham's Summing Up—you and Screed and "our times" hold your own with The Master and his in the 1930s.  Jim Drought.

 

In Jack Saunders our generation is extremely lucky to have a powerful and determined writer, an honest writer.  A Diogenes not merely of words, but of provocative thoughts.  From his hideaway in Florida, like a super-energized lobster, Saunders lashes out at the sickening hypocrisy which is deadening our senses and rotting our souls.  It is Saunders' adamant, boneheaded, determined persistence that is his great strength, his great gift to a society staggering in its own materialistic greed.  Saunders is America at its best.  He wants to clean up the world.  He is clean.  He spells out what spirit is all about.  And humanity.  How do we live?  When do we really come ALIVE?  As we should?  And deserve?  America needs writers with such strength and ferocity and independence and integrity, not all those greedy little wordmongers contemplating their private parts on every supermarket shelf.  Saunders is more than a literary volcano.  He is a live, writhing, crackling wire.  Spewing sparks in all directions.  Creating and developing a brighter, newer world.  Raymond Barrio

 

Thanks for Screed.  Nicely done.  He rolls on.  Charles Bukowski

 

The most neurotic, self-absorbed, anal-compulsive whiner on the small press scene.  Merritt Clifton

 

Your writing is very, very good and deserves wide readership and critical acceptance to boot.  You write too well, as you know too well; your stuff's too immediate and embarrassing for most people in publishing to handle.  Fashion now is supposed to be slick, easy to snort, quick literary high.  Who the hell wants to wade through 10,000 more pages of words?  I do, if you'll send them.  Judith Conaway

 

You know David, when I was in NY and walked into some book-shops one afternoon I really thought they were branches of Delicatessen, incredible what a poverty, not one single book of serious literature, colorful covers covering nothing or fake literature (if you're lucky).  If I would search for this rare unknown American author, where would I find him first?  In NY, in LA, in SF or maybe in London, in Amsterdam in...well of course NY is big enough and maybe as a naive European I probably missed the right book-shop, somebody will sell it in NY I know just get a good directory.  The point is Jack Saunders is probably too European for an American and too American for a European.  That means his books could sell very well in Iceland, not America not Europe, but just in between.  Arthur Berkhoff

 

Sanders--don't send me any more books.  They're all the same.  Spend the money on your wife and kids.  Ann Charters

 

Thanks for sending OPEN BOOK, which has a great deal of power.  Your writing continues to be energetic, important, and as always, honest.  I could have done without some of the racism, but I can't deny that you're always being you.  Richard Grayson

 

Thanks for Evil Genius and Open Book; I enjoyed both of them, and asked my publisher to send you my new book, Sideswipe, when it comes out in Feb.  In 1957, Theodore Pratt told me that Delray Beach was a better town than N.  Y.  for a writer.  "If you stay in Florida," he told me, "you'll never run out of things to write about." He was right, of course; I never have, and you won't either.  My most productive years were from age 50 to 55, and I'm sure that yours will be too.  Charles Willeford

 

Thanks for sending your latest--What?  Chapbook?  Booklet?  Pamphlet?  Expectoration?  I am happy to hear from you.  A story or a novel of yours is like a personal letter.  Also I am happy to see that you remain untamed, unregenerate, hopeless, hapless.  It's the whole of your charm.  Chauncey Mabe

 

They don't like what you have to say, but keep it up--someone will.  Jack Hunter

 

Some exciting writing.  Nick Lyons

 

I have a hunch your stuff is wild and terrific and keeps going off the rails.  I have no better explanation for why you don't find publishers, since you certainly write well enough sentence for sentence and paragraph for paragraph.  Norman Mailer

 

For Jack Saunders, who has achieved closure.  Bob Black

 

Congratulations on your imminent big day.  Your stamina is mythological.  Crad Kilodney

 

This is some very clever writing...rings true to my own wars with the publishers--good luck!  Theodore Roszak

 

You certainly seem to have a more distinguished rejection record than anyone I've ever heard of.  Madison Smartt Bell

 

At 67, I'm being re-discovered as a promising young composer, but fortunately, I never took rejection as final.  It only meant one more NO, so I just kept looking for a YES!  You certainly have a yes from me, because you are saying something personal and heartfelt.  David Amram

 

Thanks for all the work.  Too bad you are not mainstreamed.  It would be nice to see that in the New Yorker or places to reach the public.  It is important contemporary writing.  Much better than the punks.  I guess trends are what's important.  It is getting difficult to make sense of anything in the news, etc.  Good to read your sane pieces.  I should write a definitive answer to the NEA.  A manifesto signed by artists & writers.  But they get paid for their opinions.  Charles Plymell

 

Jack Saunders must surely be one of the most prolific, if not THE most prolific, of modern American writers. This, despite being relentlessly self-published. I knew his work ten years ago in print, and now it turns out he's on the web, still churning out a book a month. You can quibble about quality, but the quantity is undeniable.  Mike Gunderloy

 

Prolific and probably the most overlooked writer in America today. John Bennett

 

I clicked over to The Daily Bugle and found daily musings and serialized fiction about a character named Art (Home) Brew and his adventures "not in the mainstream" but very much "in the maelstrom" of what still might be called alternative literature.  This combination of shortish journal entries and story creates what Jack Saunders calls "the paranoia-critical method:  I write, I send it out, I write about what happens to it, and how what happens makes me feel."  It's not quite as narcissistic as that (though close), as the quickie narratives provide often fresh observations about old issues (pornography, middle-class life, existentialism).  Whether it's worth daily viewing is up for grabs, but in terms of inventing an Internet genre (cyber soap opera?  commentary fiction?) Saunders has a point:  On Earth or the Internet, if you don't fall into a clearly defined genre of writing, you're very much on your own.  Pat Holt

 

Wow you write well.  These pieces are g-o-o-d.  You should have a column.  Er--I guess you do.  I don't know how to use the net to reach more people.  I just found out in today's mail that my article on the White Male Minority, which I wrote in reaction to being at XXXXXX, was published last week in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  So when you say you sent the pieces to a forum, I'm not sure what you mean...an on-line discussion group.  I have never been part of a forum.  As an aside, I agree with what you said.  I've always said a knowledge worker answers to a higher authority than his employer.  Harris Sussman

 

To Whom It May Concern.  I have read all of James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein.  Jack Saunders is way more readable and enjoyable than any of them.  I have not read ALL of Jack Saunders, because he has written more than the aforementioned three combined, and the only place you can get Jack Saunders is FROM Jack Saunders.  Long may he wave!  Dion Wright

 

 

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