1958. I'm 14.
"Harvesting Austria" for the Mormon Church - that's me on the right.
The best part of my mission. My friend and 'little sister' Edith, her father, and my favorite Senior, Nieman.
Military discipline was a relative breeze for me after my mission. It wasn't long before I started in the writing program at the University of Utah, where John Cheever, among others, came to visit. He encouraged me to leave Utah and move East. My landing place was Yaddo - the legendary writers' retreat in upstate New York.
John Cheever, photograph courtesy The New Republic
“Max Zimmer’s manuscript was brought to my attention when I visited the university in Salt Lake last January. I found it the most striking I had read in some time and, as a member of the Academy and a visiting professor, I read a great deal. Zimmer’s European beginnings, his coming of age in a Mormon Community in the Wasatch Mountains and his keen sense of the adventurousness of being a man have all given him some splendid raw material. His sophisticated gifts in rhetoric, his capacity for an intensity of emotion and his highly disciplined prose render this raw material into some of the most interesting fiction that is being written by his generation.”
/ pulitzer prize winner john cheever, 1976 /
I looked up to John Cheever and was deeply appreciative of his support. At the time he was a celebrated writer, and I was a novice, despite being recognized by my peers at the University of Utah. His recommendation went a long way - basically it assured me of a job at SUNY-Oswego:
“During the past winter I went to five campuses, lecturing, reading and taking classes. In Utah a manuscript of Zimmer’s was given to me with perhaps twenty others. Of everything I had read at Cornell, Bennington, Syracuse, Utah, and Stanford, I thought Max’s work the most outstanding. I sent the manuscript on to the editors of the New Yorker who think him brilliant and then to the admissions committee at Yaddo who invited him to spend the summer."
After Yaddo, with Cheever's further support and at the invitation of poet Lewis Turco, founder and director of the writing program there, I secured a job teaching fiction at SUNY-Oswego.
More than thirty years later, the first 3 novels of a 4 book series are complete.
/ max zimmer /
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