Recovery

Berryman, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374248176 ISBN 13: 9780374248178

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1973

Alan Severance, a scholar and Pulitzer Prize winner, struggles to conquer his addiction to alcohol.

Review:

"What he needed for his art had been supplied by his own person, by his mind, his wit."
Saul Bellow, from the Foreword"

"What he needed for his art had been supplied by his own person, by his mind, his wit."
--Saul Bellow, from the Foreword

"Recovery is a brilliantly written, masterful portrayal of man's battle with himself for survival."--Chicago Sun-Times

"What distinguishes Recovery from many fine and powerful fictions about alcoholism are the steps it takes into allegory and art."--Los Angeles Times

"The powerful statement of a man who was there and never came back."--Kirkus Reviews

"But if Recovery is a fragment, it is a dazzling fragment, every bit as rich and macaberesquely comic as anything in Berryman's better known poems."--The Independent

"Page after page, it displays humiliations and defeats. His novel, while written in prose, has the effect of a poem about the desolation of total selfpunishment. Sometimes, not even God and AA, acting in concert, can help with that."--National Post

About the Author:

John Berryman (1914-1972) was an American poet and scholar. He spent much of his career at the University of Minnesota. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1964 for 77 Dream Songs and was the recipient of the National Book Award for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. He is the author of several books of poetry and the biography Stephen Crane. Berryman died in 1972 after jumping to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was an award-winning author whose works include The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, and Humboldt's Gifts. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.