Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees (Hardcover)

by James Reidel (Author) "In her last year, in the months after the assassination of President Kennedy, Sarah Kees lived in a retirement manor that resembled a motel, that..." (more)
Key Phrases: fall quarter, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"A splendid biography." -- David Wojahn, author of Spirit Cabinet

"James Reidel knows more about Kees than anyone else alive." -- Donald Justice, author of Oblivion: On Writers and Writing

Review
"Reidel . . . provides an intimate view of an indecipherable poet, critic, painter, musician, and filmmaker whom some critics (e.g. Dana Gioia) have long considered woefully underappreciated. This book may help change that. . . . Reidel''s invitation into Kees''s life leaves the reader reaching for his poetry, hungry for clues."-Choice (Choice )

"The biography of an American writer who is not nearly as famous as he ought to be. . . . Weldon Kees (1914-55?) is the ''nearly'' man of 20th-century American poetry-and . . . fiction, art and music and poetry criticism, Abstract Expressionist painting, traditional jazz (both pianism and composition), avant-garde theatricals and documentary filmmaking. Until I read the poet James Reidel''s biography, Vanished Act, I had not realized how ''nearly'' Kees was, and how far he came, in so many fields of artistic endeavor. . . . [A] really good, well-written and thoughtful biography."-Michael Hofmann, The New York Times Book Review (Michael Hofmann The New York Times Book Review )

"Poet, fiction writer, painter, critic, filmmaker, playwright, musician-Weldon Kees had a seemingly bottomless supply of creativity and an artistic output as diverse as anyone working in the years surrounding World War II. . . . Vanished Act, the first biography of the artist to appear . . . [is] a thorough, clear-eyed account of Kees''s life."-Washington Post Book World (Washington Post Book World )

"Long overdue biography of an important American poet. . . . Reidel''s two decades of scholarship fleshes out the details in the life of this enigmatic 20th-century writer and artist."-Kirkus (Kirkus )

"The story of Weldon Kees is not so much one of an achievement as it is the story of an aspiration and its afterglow. The man has a dusky, flickering allure. . . . James Reidel does not attempt to make the story any happier than it is. He frames his biography with images of ones who were left behind. . . . Reidel is right to give the book a novelist's mood-setting touches, and he is right to have shaped the account in terms of the places where Kees lived, with long sections on Nebraska, New York, Provincetown, and San Francisco. Yet, in the end this remains a conventional biography, an attempt to step back and let the life tell itself."-Jed Perl, Harper's Magazine (Jed Perl Harper's Magazine )

"[We are] privy to the life, art, and anxieties of a man . . . poignantly representative of the artist''s struggle to survive in wartime and post-war America. . . . Reidel has meticulously catalogued a complicated and engaging life. This book (to be followed this winter by a volume of poems and a collection of critical essays on Kees, also from University of Nebraska Press) will be of great interest to Kees''s admirers and should also broaden their ranks."-Jennifer Liese, Bookforum (Jennifer Liese Bookforum )

"Mr. Reidel uses biography as a poetic form. His mission is to re-create the experience that drew people to Kees, who enchanted women and men alike because he completely immersed himself in art and made his life into art."-Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun (Carl Rollyson The New York Sun )

"Reidel has done a great deal with Kees' 41 years, producing a 400 page book dedicated to the man's known life and work. . . . His prose is clean, compelling, and reads with the ease of a novel. In doing so, it gives us another valuable history-social, aesthetic, and political-of the thirties, forties, and start of the fifties."-Stephen Motika, Another Chicago Magazine (Stephen Motika Another Chicago Magazine )

"Now, for the first time, a biographer has tried to unravel Kees'' complicated world. [P]oet and editor James Reidel hopes to introduce a wider world to the talent and contradictions of Kees."-Omaha World-Herald (Omaha World-Herald )

"Vanished Act lucidly examines Kees's heartbreaking life."-David Caplan, The Weekly Standard (David Caplan The Weekly Standard )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 418 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (June 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803239513
• ISBN-13: 978-0803239517
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,490,028 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Neglected Genius, August 21, 2003

By	"31853" (Waltham, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This is an entertaining and beautifully and lovingly written biography of a neglected but indelible American poet. Read the poems, and read this book, do yourself a favor.

5.0 out of 5 stars The Weldon Kees Sightings Club (From ahadada books), September 10, 2008

By	M. Hori "Jesse Glass" (Urayasu, Chiba Japan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees (Paperback)

Little did I know, when sitting in on some of Hugh Kenner's lectures at Johns Hopkins University decades ago, that I was in the presence of the most distinguished member of a very elite group of people: those who were dead certain that they had met Weldon Kees days after police found the poet's abandoned car at the Golden Gate Bridge on July 18th, 1955. According to James Reidel, the author of this excellent biography of this astonishingly gifted suicide, "When Hugh Kenner learned in August that Kees had vanished the month before, he too found it hard to believe. He was sure he had seen his friend in the Santa Barbara Library in late July....Kenner had not talked long in the library with Kees, who seemed preoccupied by something..."(Pg. 358). Preoccupied indeed! Kees, a painter, novelist, short story writer, musician, film maker, critic, and as major a poet as was ever to be considered minor, seems almost a walking embodiment of the post-modern muse. Both an admirer of Hart Crane and a student of the myth of Ambrose Bierce's self-elopement to Mexico, Kees' story draws to it urban myths as easily as iron filings slide towards a magnet. For today's poets he is the equivalent of the Vanishing Hitchhiker and Reidel makes that point again and again. (Perhaps a little too much.) His book opens with a key in the door of Kees' last apartment, a cop answering the persistent ringing of the telephone to report that no one was on the other end of the line (perhaps a ghostly echo of one of Kees' most famous "Robinson" poems), bafflement, lost hope and then despair among friends and family--except for Kees' estranged first wife Ann, who was certain Weldon had taken the high dive from the Golden Gate. If he did, (and this reviewer for one believes that he did), the loss continues. Who knows what Kees would have done if he had beaten his string of bad luck and disappointments and lived out his full term of years? Yet another interesting connection emerged for me in reading this book, and that was Kees' admiration for the poetry of Lindley Williams Hubbell, yet another near-unknown yet gifted writer (a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award), who chose to end his own poetic career by traveling to Japan around the time of Kees' disappearance, also never to return. In addition, Reidel illuminates the connection between Kees and Rexroth (one I could never figure out), tells us of Kees' dislike of Kenneth Patchen, love of tough guy movies, immaculate grooming, fascination with the gay scene (as attested to by the poet James Broughton and others), his wicked wit and pacifism, and all things anyone would want to know about Weldon Kees.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen more pictures in this book, especially of Kees' art, and perhaps stills from his films. All in all, though, this is a very good volume to put next to Kees' Collected Poems on your bookself.

3.0 out of 5 stars Kee's other "Vanished Art", March 6, 2008

By	boomerhead "a reviewer" (MD, USA) - See all my reviews

While I can't comment on this book or his poetry with any authority, I would like to point out another facet to Kees' creativity to those who are interested - he was also an amazingly accomplished painter. The artworks illustrated in recent book, "The Writer's Brush," were my first introduction to him, and they every bit as compelling and interesting as anything else being produced at that time, if not moreso.