Praise

E.L. Doctorow came to the University of Utah in 1976 for a two-week residency as part of a college tour following the publication of Ragtime. I was thrilled he was coming because I’d just read The Book of Daniel and loved it. At the time, I was working on a panoramic novel set in the western states, modeled on Pynchon’s V and Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction. I submitted part of the manuscript for his review. On the day of my appointment, I showed up at the office they’d given him and introduced myself. “You’re Zimmer,” he said. He picked up my folder and got up. Then he said something I’ll never forget. “This is too big for this room. Let’s go outside.” On the grass outside, he paged slowly through the manuscript, shaking his head, and said, “There’s at least one instance of brilliance on every page. One line that just snaps your head around.” And he read a few random ones. He said it was the best manuscript he’d seen of all the colleges and universities he’d visited so far. I asked him if he thought it was publishable. He just gave me this disbelieving look, and then smiled, and then said, “This is the most publishable manuscript I’ve seen in a long time. As soon as it’s finished, I want you to send it to me.”

/  Max zimmer  /

John Cheever came to Utah in the late fall of 1976 a few months after Doctorow. I’d read a couple of his stories, didn’t feel I had anything in common with him, and told Dave Smith, the poet and director of the Graduate Writing Program, that I wasn’t interested in showing him my work. Smith gave Cheever my story “Utah Died for Your Sins” anyway, and made an appointment for me, saying that I was the star of the writing program and couldn’t go without seeing Cheever. Cheever loved “Utah Died.” He talked about the “savagery and enthusiasm” of my writing. When I told him I was working on a novel, he told me I had to “master the short form first.” He also told me to get out of Utah and come East, and secured me a summer stay at Yaddo to get me started.

Here is what he wrote to Curt Harnack, Yaddo's President: 

“Dear Curt, I am enclosing a story by a graduate student-teacher whose work I read in Salt Lake City last month and for whom I would like to apply, by proxy, for a stay at Yaddo this summer. The various dead-lines and other formalities don’t seem to prevail under the circumstances. Zimmer is thirty-two and I know him to be civil, clean and industrious. I think his work outstanding and [Charles] McGrath at the New Yorker agrees with me on this. Zimmer’s summer is free and I trust we can settle on some dates when we meet on the fifth. Yours, John.”

/  max zimmer  /

In 1997, Ray Carver nominated “Utah Died for Your Sins,” my first published short story, for the Pushcart Prize - and it won.

As the last reader on the last day of a three-day SUNY Writers’ Conference in Binghamton, I read “Utah Died for Your Sins” to an auditorium of poets, novelists, short story writers, faculty, and students. There was silence when I finished. Then the place exploded in applause and shouting. I was the only reader at the conference to receive a standing ovation. John Gardner, who taught at Binghamton at the time, ran up on the stage and said, “As Tolstoy said to Dostoyevsky, with tears running down his cheeks, ‘What a terrible, beautiful story!’” Subsequent to the conference, he had an invitation to launch a creative writing program at George Mason University, and wanted me to launch it with him. He died, tragically, in a motorcycle accident that year.

/  max zimmer  /