He reflects on the circumstances of his adoption, the subtle disappointments of childhood, and his complicated relationship with his adoptive family. A precocious Jewish boy grows up in the Midwest and leaves for Harvard. The stories described situations that resembled Brodkey’s life. In 1970, Farrar Straus and Giroux (FSG) purchased the novel from Random House, with Brodkey agreeing to a “three-book contract” that would be fulfilled “later that year.” During the 1970s, two long stories appeared in the New Yorker-“A Story in an Almost Classical Mode” (1973) and “Largely an Oral History of My Mother” (1976)-that a subscriber might reasonably have assumed were from the forthcoming novel. The publication history of Brodkey’s novel is so labyrinthian that it is at times difficult to know what’s fact and what’s apocryphal, but the following events demarcate the broad lines of the story. First contracted by Random House in 1964 but unfinished for nearly three decades, the novel-then known under its working title, A Party of Animals-moved between two other publishing houses before its controversial publication under a new name. It’s difficult to think of an American novel with a publication history more complicated than Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul (1991).
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