fall M - Department of English - University of Minnesota

P HOTO BY T ERRY F AUST
Chabon to speak to their undergraduate
English class. The rigorous requirement
for the honor of having an award-winning
writer come to your class: the class had to
her nose buried in this fat novel with a yellow
and red cartoon cover called The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,
which she claimed was the best book she
She came home from California with her nose buried in
this fat novel with a yellow and red cartoon cover called The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon
TEACHING WITH MICHAEL
CHABON
By MOLLY HENNESSEY
Late in the 2002 fall semester an
email circulated asking English
instructors if they would like
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and the
spring 2003 Esther Freier lecturer Michael
meet at 9:00 am on Mondays. (The due
date of Chabon and his wife’s fourth child
required a frantic rescheduling of his
appearance from April to February, thus
the last-minute call to instructors and the
restricted time frame). Sometimes I’m
lucky. My composition class for spring fit
the bill. Michael Chabon would be coming
to my class on a Monday morning in
February.
My sister had introduced me to Michael
Chabon’s work the previous summer. She
came home from college in California with
had read in years. It became my family’s
summer book. We secured more copies
and we all read it. Because we never had a
sufficient number of books for each of us
to have our own copy (six), the books were
communal and all had multiple dog-eared
pages.
Kavalier and Clay seemed to satisfy us all.
I liked the main characters—the hero and
his sidekick—Joe and Sam. I liked the
story. I liked the worlds of the novel—especially
New York City in the 30s and 40s,
Chabon—continued on page 14
THE ESTHER
FREIERENDOWED
LECTURE SERIES IN LITERATURE
JAMAICA KINCAID February 5 2001
BARRY LOPEZ
March 15 2002
EDMUND WHITE November 22 2003
MICHAEL CHABON February 9 2003
ARNOLD RAMPERSAD October 10 2003
A. S. BYATT
April 17 2004
Esther Freier was the first woman president of the Academy of Clinical Laboratory
Physicians and Scientists. She retired from the University Medical School faculty
holding the only endowed chair in Medical Technology in the nation. Dr. Freier
loved literature and the arts. In her view, too much donated money went to science,
and not enough to the arts. Her endowment to our English Department resulted
in the creation of the Esther Freier Endowed Lecture Series. Its mission: bring significant
national and international writers to the University community.
EDMUND WHITE:
PROFILE OF A WRITER
By M. J. HENSLEY
Edmund White delivered the
Esther Freier Lecture “My
Historical Novel,” on November
22, 2002. His first historical novel, Fanny:
A Fiction—scheduled for release in October
2003—just completed, White sought to
share some of the experience gained while
writing this novel. “You must be
brave,” he told his audience, “to be
an archeologist of the past. Your
intention should be to encounter
the past, not as we would hope it
had been, but as it was.” The narrator
of the novel, Frances Trollope
(mother of Anthony Trollope), provides
an outsider’s view of
early nineteenth-century America.
White--continued on page 12
Edmund White
P HOTO BY T ERRY F AUST
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
3