Boswell: A Modern Comedy

James Boswell is a professional strongman and a wrestler. He is also a loveable leech who amasses friends of wealth and influence as his own insurance policy against death, an obsession that leads him from coast to coast, crashing parties and mentioning any celebrity whose name will grant him an ounce of social currency. But when those around him begin dying, Boswell is forced to confront his own mortality and determine once and for all how to find permanence in an ephemeral world.   Poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, Boswell is Elkin’s engaging novel of one man’s desperate attempts to outmaneuver death, and an acerbic take on the follies of the American Dream.   This ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate and from the Stanley Elkin archives at Washington University in St. Louis.

New York Times Book Review

Brilliant. . . . His sentences are long riffs of jazz; the words swarm and gather; the prose is exuberantly betroped, exhilaratingly de trop.

Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning author of novels, short stories, and essays. Born in the Bronx, Elkin received his BA and PhD from the University of Illinois and in 1960 became a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis where he taught until his death. His critically acclaimed works include the National Book Critics Circle Award–winners George Mills (1982) and Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995), as well as the National Book Award finalists The Dick Gibson Show (1972), Searches and Seizures (1974), and The MacGuffin (1991). His book of novellas, Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award.