Vernon, John
Entry updated 4 December 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1943- ) US academic and author, some of whose novels have been nonfantastic Westerns, including Lucky Billy (2008), a mythopoeically-told rendering of the Billy the Kid "saga". "Gulliver Goes South" (August 1992 Harper's) is a Gulliver tale. The narrator of Lindbergh's Son (1987) is a Brain in a Box who may, in some Alternate World, be Charles Lindbergh's son. In Peter Doyle (1991), the ingeniously mutilated corpse of Napoleon Buonaparte ends up in America, initially in the hands of Walt Whitman's friend Peter Doyle, though its travels (see Tale of Circulation) do not end here; a picaresque vision of nineteenth-century America is assembled.
Vernon should not be confused with the actor John Vernon (1932-2005). [JC]
John Edward Vernon
born Cambridge, Massachusetts: 3 June 1943
works (selected)
- Lindbergh's Son (New York: Viking, 1987) [hb/]
- Peter Doyle (New York: Random House, 1991) [hb/]
- Lucky Billy (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) [hb/]
nonfiction (selected)
- The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1973) [nonfiction: hb/nonpictorial]
links
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