The Blowtop [Paperback]

Alvin Schwartz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2001

The Blowtop was the only American novel to reveal in exquisite detail how brutally the years immediately following the horrors of World War II reshaped the gentle Bohemian art world that preceded it. Written in 1946, a year before Camus' uncannily similar "L'Etranghre," The Blowtop was not published until 1948 because of its unsparing revelations of a destructive and deadly art style. In the end, it was finally released in a mystery jacket. And soon after, The Blowtop became a cult book especially at Columbia University. In the spring of 1948 it was claimed that it sparked the "beat" movement which presumably emerged out of discussions of a new art approach among students at Columbia, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg. Two years later, The Blowtop was taken up in Paris by followers of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whose excitement turned it into a best seller where in 1950 it appeared under the title "Le Cingli", published by Les Editions de L'Elan. The Blowtop opens in a Sheridan Street bar in the Village with the apparently pointless killing of a small-time marijuana dealer and slowly introduces the reader to the effect of this murder on a variety of Village types, artists, writers, barflies, academics and their various loves as it gradually uncovers the sources of an art movement that was to sweep the world with names like Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, and Hans Hofman. The purpose of their apparently nihilistic efforts was to get at "the things that were left over"- that sense of value and spirit in the world that a war culminating in the atomic bomb had so thoroughly blasted away. It was this desperate effort to rediscover the things that matter through death, through sex, through art that challenges and enlightens the reader through every page of this revealing and powerful novel.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Born in NYC in 1916, Alvin Schwartz began his literary career while still in high school as a co-editor of Mosaic, a "little" magazine of the thirties that published such luminaries as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, R.P. Blackmur and Gertrude Stein. He wrote critical pieces for other little mags including Ken Giniger's Lion & Unicorn, while his poetry and criticism also appeared in such places as Voices, The American Scholar and American Imago.Caught in the depression, he turned to writing comics for a living and was soon scripting the two leading newspaper strips of the day, Batman and Superman. He was often described as having a double identity, like Superman, his comics writing extending all the way to the creation of two best-selling Superman Operettas at a time when The Blowtop, his first novel, was being described in the NY Times as probably the first conscious existentialist novel in America.Schwartz's close friendships with many of the leading abstract expressionist painters, including Pollock and DeKooning among others, as well as contacts with some of the leading French existentialists such as Simon de Beauvoir and Jean Wahl also marked his work and led eventually to publication of The Blowtop in France (Les Editions de l"Elan Paris 1950) where under the title of Le Cingli, it became a best seller. His most recent book, written in his eighties, entitled: An Unlikely Prophet, is a memoir dealing with some very off-the-wall experiences generated by his years doing not only Superman but the mix of literary genres that followed. Described by some critics as offering a new and exciting vision of reality, this late work also leans very heavily on insights first intimated in his seminal early work, The Blowtop, lending credence to the likelihood that the latter's cult role at Columbia University may very well have set a direction for Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac who were Columbia undergrads at the time.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Olmstead Press (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158754007X
• ISBN-13: 978-1587540073
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,347,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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