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On September 6, 1926, author Clancy Sigal was born.
Clancy Sigal
Sigal in 2002
Born: September 6, 1926; Chicago, Illinois
Died: July 16, 2017 (aged 90); Los Angeles, California
Awards:
PEN Lifetime Achievement Award
National Book Award nominee, Going Away
Website: ClancySigal.com
Clancy Sigal (September 6, 1926 – July 16, 2017) was an American writer, and the author of dozens of essays and seven books, the best-known of which is the autobiographical novel Going Away (1961).
Early life and education
Sigal was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a poor family. His father, Leo Sigal, and mother, Jennie Persily, were both labor organizers; He "acquired his chutzpah and resilience in 30s Chicago," Kim Howells wrote in The Guardian, "raised by his tough Jewish mother in a neighborhood blighted by gangsters, poverty and violence." He later wrote a book about his mother, A Woman of Uncertain Character (2007). There he describes joining the Communist Party at 15. Marc Cooper, reviewing the book for the Los Angeles Times, explained that "Nothing, he figured, could be a greater affront to Jennie, who was an ardent socialist but an even more ardent anti-Communist." During World War II, "The army saved my life," he later wrote. The high point of his time as a soldier in Occupied Germany, he later said, came when "I went AWOL to the Nuremberg War Crimes trial bent on shooting Hermann Goering." After the war he worked as an organizer in Detroit for the auto workers' union, but was expelled in a purge of communists and fellow travelers. He then moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) under the G.I. Bill; he was managing editor of the student newspaper, the Daily Bruin. His "drinking buddies," he later wrote, "included the later Watergate conspirators, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, the latter of whom reported me regularly to the FBI."
Career
After graduating from UCLA in 1950, he got a job at Columbia Pictures, but was fired by Columbia boss Harry Cohn for making copies of radical leaflets on studio equipment (he dropped the leaflets over Los Angeles from an airplane). He then went to work as a Hollywood agent, during the blacklist years of the 1950s—the basis of his memoir Black Sunset. He was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he wrote in that book, but his hearing was abruptly cancelled. Soon after, in 1957, he left Los Angeles and the U.S.—the story he told in Going Away—and settled in Great Britain.
In 1961 he published Going Away. The book is set in 1956 and tells the story of the author's drive from Los Angeles to New York "to look at America and figure out why it isn't my country any longer." It won a National Book Award nomination. John Leonard later wrote in the New York Times: "Better than any other document I know, Going Away identified, embodied and re‐created the postwar American radical experience. It was as if On the Road had been written by somebody with brains.... (Sigal's) intelligence is always ticking. His ear is superb. His sympathies are promiscuous. His sin is enthusiasm."
{snip}
Sigal in 2002
Born: September 6, 1926; Chicago, Illinois
Died: July 16, 2017 (aged 90); Los Angeles, California
Awards:
PEN Lifetime Achievement Award
National Book Award nominee, Going Away
Website: ClancySigal.com
Clancy Sigal (September 6, 1926 – July 16, 2017) was an American writer, and the author of dozens of essays and seven books, the best-known of which is the autobiographical novel Going Away (1961).
Early life and education
Sigal was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a poor family. His father, Leo Sigal, and mother, Jennie Persily, were both labor organizers; He "acquired his chutzpah and resilience in 30s Chicago," Kim Howells wrote in The Guardian, "raised by his tough Jewish mother in a neighborhood blighted by gangsters, poverty and violence." He later wrote a book about his mother, A Woman of Uncertain Character (2007). There he describes joining the Communist Party at 15. Marc Cooper, reviewing the book for the Los Angeles Times, explained that "Nothing, he figured, could be a greater affront to Jennie, who was an ardent socialist but an even more ardent anti-Communist." During World War II, "The army saved my life," he later wrote. The high point of his time as a soldier in Occupied Germany, he later said, came when "I went AWOL to the Nuremberg War Crimes trial bent on shooting Hermann Goering." After the war he worked as an organizer in Detroit for the auto workers' union, but was expelled in a purge of communists and fellow travelers. He then moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) under the G.I. Bill; he was managing editor of the student newspaper, the Daily Bruin. His "drinking buddies," he later wrote, "included the later Watergate conspirators, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, the latter of whom reported me regularly to the FBI."
Career
After graduating from UCLA in 1950, he got a job at Columbia Pictures, but was fired by Columbia boss Harry Cohn for making copies of radical leaflets on studio equipment (he dropped the leaflets over Los Angeles from an airplane). He then went to work as a Hollywood agent, during the blacklist years of the 1950s—the basis of his memoir Black Sunset. He was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he wrote in that book, but his hearing was abruptly cancelled. Soon after, in 1957, he left Los Angeles and the U.S.—the story he told in Going Away—and settled in Great Britain.
In 1961 he published Going Away. The book is set in 1956 and tells the story of the author's drive from Los Angeles to New York "to look at America and figure out why it isn't my country any longer." It won a National Book Award nomination. John Leonard later wrote in the New York Times: "Better than any other document I know, Going Away identified, embodied and re‐created the postwar American radical experience. It was as if On the Road had been written by somebody with brains.... (Sigal's) intelligence is always ticking. His ear is superb. His sympathies are promiscuous. His sin is enthusiasm."
{snip}