From birth in Los Angeles, James Thackara grew up in book solitude, a post-World War Ishmael through ten schools and four languages. He graduated from Harvard a lifelong intimate of Robert Lowell and Peter Taylor circles. As a VietNam exile to London, the writer was cultivated by Eliot’s executor Peter DuSautoy and at Donald Ogden Stewart’s Hollywood Ten salons. His narrative influences are in America’s lost generation writers, William Faulkner, and the Russian moralists.
Thackara’s relation with PEN – among ten Soviet-era human rights groupings he has worked separately with as “applied literature” – began at the 1985 Hamburg International Writers Congress, from whence Thackara witnessed the Berlin he would burn in THE BOOK OF KINGS (Penguin Overlook 1999), and walked its still bombed-out Eastern Sector. Today, the prophetic experience of twenty years writing the full German Reich – its first draft 1700 pages – informs this American writer’s venture home to his patria similarly betrayed and overturned.
Thackara is currently finishing a family tale of two races’ Shanghai pilgrimage through Mao’s revolution.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE: …”without peers among American novelists working today.”