About the Book
As Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Yusef Komunyakaa states in his introduction, "The Fire Within goes directly back to a query of the soil, to nature, and to the people ... Blackburn underscores how imagination is the fuse and fuel of national (natural) dreaming." In Blackburn's own words, "If we didn't believe that imagination in general and the literary imagination in particular hold us together and are central to human survival, I would not hesitate to omit from these reflections most of the personal notes that resemble a memoir..." Thankfully, Mr Blackburn is a consummate professor whose skills were honed at Yale, polished at Cambridge, and deeply imbued by his own home grown love of literature and the South where he grew up. Few alive today possess as much knowledge as this amiable, humorous, wonderfully learned man.
The beauty of this book is the warmth of the writer. The scholar is of course in every word, yet the way he present his facts is that of a detective. He pulls the curtain of the past and shows us the real rather than the merely stormy Heathcliff and the true love affair of Tristan and Isolde. Dr Blackburn's vast knowledge crosses the boundaries of international culture as he shows us "what it all means" and why the human imaginative process is vital to our survival. More particularly, it is in his most insightful coverage of Frank Waters, Joseph Campbell, and the myth of the Ancient Mariner that we become awakened to so many things we may have studied but didn't fully understand.
Step along with the professor when he takes us to a New York deli where we meet The Tea Bag Man, a contemporary, ragged version of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.
In the end, when you have finished reading The Fire Within, you have not only widened your mind, but have been graced with a clearer grasp of the literature of the world.
About the Author :
Yusef Komunyakaa is the recipient of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Alexander Lambert Blackburn was born in Durham, N. C., where his father was a teacher of writers at Duke University. Thus as a boy he was shaped by an environment of imaginative writers, including such future luminaries as William Styron, Mac Hyman, and Reynolds Price. Inspired by his father, Alex Blackburn carried a passion for writing across his academic training at Andover, Yale, UNC Chapel Hill, and Cambridge University ( Ph. D. in English). After graduation from Yale he volunteered as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and was dutifully radiated at an atomic bomb test. After stints teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and world classics at the University of Maryland's European Division, he pioneered in the teaching of those subjects at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where he also founded and edited Writers' Forum, a literary journal devoted to discovering and publishing new writers from the West. Blackburn has published four novels, a collection of essays, a study of the origins of modern fiction in the picaresque novel in Spain, France, England, Germany and America, a major critical study of southwestern novelist-philosopher Frank Waters (seven times nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature), and an autobiographical / biographical memoir, recently published by Irie Books- The Fire Within: Reflections on the Literary Imagination in which he explores the nature of creative imagination. He has also published two ground- breaking anthologies of fiction writers, most of whom were/are from the West. The most complete biographical information to date is to be found in Blackburn's memoirs, Meeting the Professor and The Fire Within, and in John Nizalowski, "Embracing the West: An Interview with Alexander Blackburn," The Bloomsbury Review, July/August 2006. The Alexander Blackburn Collection is deposited with the David M. Rubenstein Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Box 90185, Durham, NC 27708-0185. Blackburn as an author or editor has published 31 books and has co-edited with John Nizalowski The Emergence of Frank Waters, a collection of critical essays by various literary scholars. For his work as educator, novelist, critic and editor, Blackburn in 2005 received the Frank Waters Award for Excellence in Literature. Among previous winners of this prestigious national and international award are: N. Scott Momaday, Barbara Kingsolver, Tony Hillerman, John Nichols, Joanne Greenberg and Ann Zwinger. Suddenly a Mortal Splendor, touted as deserving of a Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in The Dallas Morning News review, was runner-up for the 1996 Colorado Book Award in Fiction. The Voice of the Children has received the International PeaceWriting Prize. Blackburn has also won a faculty book award from the University of Colorado, a first prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Chancellor's Award for outstanding service to the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Alex's Web Page is: alexanderblackburn.com
Review :
The Interior Country: Stories of the Modern West. Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1987. Edited with Craig Lesley.
The introduction is the best essay on the American West I've ever read. -- Frank Waters.
I like the introduction, which corroborates some notions I have held for a long time... This is a really good, various, rich collection. I'll treasure it, quote it, and plug it - Wallace Stegner, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Meeting the Professor is one of those astounding autobiographies I've ever read. Although tender and sometimes even sweet, it also exposes the heat of the southern forge that would produce the determined westerner Blackburn became. Through that galvanizing process, Blackburn developed a national vision, worldview. His life, in short, has demonstrated the vital importance of tying regional identity with universal understanding as a method of exploring the intricacies of the human condition. -- Clay Reynolds, Director of Creative Writing, University of Texas at Dallas
Rare, indeed, is the father in American literature. Rare, too, the world of academia that escapes satire. And rarer, yet, the humble treatment of aristocrats. Here we have treatment of all three done with great tact and intelligence. -- Max Steele, recipient of the Harper Award and a founding editor of The Paris Review
William Blackburn possessed that subtle, ineffable, magnetically appealing quality - a kind of invisible rapture - which caused students to respond with like rapture to the fresh and wondrous new world he was trying to reveal to them. -- William Styron, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Creative Spirit. Creative Arts Book Company, 2001.
Blackburn has collected 17 essays united by the theme of the creative spirit in literature and life. Whether discussing the picaresque novel or revolutionary discoveries in neuro- psychology, these learned but accessible essays investigate the importance of the creative writer and literature, particularly in a society in which materialism and anti- intellectualism are rampant. -- Library Journal
The Myth of the Picaro. The University of North Carolina Press, 1979. UNC Enduring Editions, 2014.
Mr. Blackburn has done for the picaresque something analogous to what Empson did for the pastoral: after extracting the myth from the form, they both discover that myth is in some unlikely books. Mr. Blackburn's book bids fair to acquire something of the same enduring fame as Empson's Varieties of Pastoral. -- Reader's report, UNC Press
