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Grumbles, Wm. Patterson Edition: The "Big Critical Overview" 
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Joined: Mon May 02, 2011 2:10 pm
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Post Grumbles, Wm. Patterson Edition: The "Big Critical Overview"
I was fortunate enough to have a number of "conversations" with Bill via IM in 2011-12. I will post here a few excerpts that others might find interesting.

I just wish there were more...

June 15, 2011:

Robert Pearson:
Jack Kelly wrote at my Forum post "publisher insisted on removing anything from the biography that smacked of literary analysis" which would explain my perception of less "literary biography." I'm sure that's right--you've written whole books of that, obviously. Was there a choice by you as author to do somewhat less of this or would you have liked to do more?


Bill Patterson:
I don't know why Jack had that impression. The publisher didn't have anything to do with that. When I got an impression of the wealth of source material that was available (in 2000), I rapidly realized that trying to do much in the way of critical commentary would inflate the biography to four big volumes, so I didn't put in much at all. I am doing a bit more in the second volume, less interpretation than showing how the joins and seams of the three "big" public words (Starship Troopers, Stranger, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) are put together and how they treat their sources.

But given that it's been more than twenty years since a general survey of Heinlein's entire body of work has been put out, Robert James and I are planning to do a big critical overview, somewhat similar to the overview that Toupence and Ellerby did with Bradbury a few years ago.

Does anyone know if Bill and R. James had done any work on this "big critical overview"? I would hope that if so, it could be carried on.

Also, you'll note that in v. 2 the "joins and seams" of the "Big Three" works were indeed expanded upon.

(More to come)

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Fri Feb 27, 2015 5:12 pm
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Joined: Mon Apr 14, 2008 4:09 pm
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Post Re: Grumbles, Wm. Patterson Edition: The "Big Critical Overv
Robert, the easiest to know what had been done with Robert James would be to ask him...I suspect via the Facebook Heinlein Forum you'd get a fairly quick reply. I don't think they'd gotten very far...he's been pretty busy writing his cinema books over the last few years.


Sun Mar 22, 2015 3:44 pm
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