About the Book
James Fitzgerald likes his life the way it is. He has a stable academic career teaching American literature; a comfortable townhouse in Brooklyn; a satisfying, open marriage with his partner of fifteen years; a sweet and playful young boyfriend; and a recently-published, well-received novel about a famous early-twentieth-century Harvard professor. But his poise is shattered when a woman appears at a book signing bearing a surprise gift: an unsent letter from her brother Gregory, James' first boyfriend and-ever since Gregory's sudden death twenty-five years ago-the dark gravitational center of James' intellectual and emotional life. What follows is a near hallucinatory night of soul-questioning as James, wandering the streets of New York, re-examines his stormy, life-altering relationship with Gregory, a charismatic, self-destructive activist and writer and the real impetus behind James' new novel.
Rapidly shifting between the late 1980s, when AIDS cut a deadly swath through the gay community, and the dawn of the Trump era where social media and political polarization threaten another kind of death sentence, American Scholar tells the story of a man driven to discover but afraid to know the truth about himself and his loves past and present.
About the Author :
Born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania, Patrick E. Horrigan received his BA from The Catholic University of America and his PhD from Columbia University. Winner of Long Island University's David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching, he taught literature for twenty-five years at LIU Brooklyn. He lives in Manhattan.
Review :
"American Scholar is an exquisite and soulful leap into the landscape of love and memory, literature and history. Sexy and moving, the book is a masterful fugue on how we unravel the mystery of our lives and loves." - Tim Miller, performer and author of A Body in the O: Performances and Stories
"A haunting, complex look at love, gay history, and the passage of time." - Kirkus Reviews
"American Scholar is a big, ambitious, beautifully written book. It's deeply felt and powerfully moving but quick on its feet and witty. It struck so many chords, I began to wonder if the author had access to my personal diaries or memory bank. But that's the power of great storytelling. We see something of ourselves staring back at us." - Paul Burston, author of We Can Be Heroes: A Survivor's Story
"American Scholar tells the story of writer and scholar James Fitzgerald, as an unsure graduate student during the dark days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, as well as a married man in the present at odds with his husband over whether or not to have children. The novel makes use of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney's love story, as well as Matthiessen's scholarship, building on both to tell a story that is timely, poignant, and moving." - Scott Bane, author of A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney
"How does the past inform our present? How do the books that we read, the authors we revere, shape our lives? How do we wrestle with the absence of the people we've loved and lost? These are the questions that preoccupy Patrick E. Horrigan's beautiful American Scholar, a novel that is at once an examination of both the AIDS years and our own turbulent times, and a haunting look at the secret love of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, who hover in the margins like benign ghosts. The novel brims with enthusiasm for art, for literature, for popular culture, for sex, for connection. Given our culture's forgetful nature, we need more books like this one, books that connect us to a past that is all too rapidly slipping away." - Drew Patrick Shannon, Associate Professor of English, Mount St. Joseph University
"Oscillating between the first AIDS era and the distinct but unsteady present, the novel focuses on the experience of the varieties of love, the protagonist's mutual infatuations with a brooding, galvanizing, off-putting lover and the real-life love affair between the literary critic F.O. Matthiessen and the artist Russell Cheney. The temporal experiment pays off thrillingly as different periods of gay experience and reflections on the implications of gay history, literary and personal, ricochet and resound. Throughout, Horrigan deftly incorporates a heady and inviting series of references to great queer authors (Woolf, Forster, Baldwin, Melville, and Matthiessen) while evoking, especially, the quickly shifting and history-making moment of the late 1980s, when queer theory was born and countless gays lost their lives to a relentless disease. The novel, both lyrical and tough-minded, tracks these epochs with grace, tenderness, erotic frisson, critical intelligence, and plangent skill. It's a novel of ideas, an inspired piece of autofiction, and a work to which I will often return." - David Greven, author of Men Beyond Desire
