Gilbert Sorrentino

Gilbert Sorrentino (1929–2006) was an experimental writer and poet who wrote 19 novels, 10 collections of poetry, a book of essays, a collection of stories, and a novella. He is particularly known for his use of formal constraints and metafictional conceits. Sorrentino was born in Brooklyn on April 7, 1929, and went to public schools there. Although he had two stints at Brooklyn College in the 1950s, he never completed his degree, and is usually considered an autodidact. He served in the Medical Corps of the US Army, and, upon leaving in 1953, decided to become a writer. Sorrentino's first marriage to Elsene Wiessner ended in 1960 after a cross-country road trip, which he fictionalized in The Sky Changes (1966). They had two children, Jesse and Delia. Sorrentino subsequently married Victoria Ortiz and had another child, the novelist Christopher Sorrentino. Sorrentino achieved some early renown as a poet with links to Robert Creeley and the Black Mountain school. He founded the journal Neon with Hugh Selby, Jr. and others and served as its editor until 1960. During this period, William Carlos Williams included a small piece of Sorrentino's writing in Book Five of the long poem Paterson (1958). He then edited the journal Kulchur in the early 1960s and worked as an editor at Grove Press under Barney Rossett through the end of the 1960s. Sorrentino also had a long friendship with John O'Brien, and encouraged him to create the Review of Contemporary Fiction and Dalkey Archive Press.