Connell,' journalist, biographer and Kansas City resident Steve Paul has constructed a meticulous, intriguing, and long-overdue appraisal of a talent deserving of wider attention. Moreover, because he never taught, he lacks any protégés to keep the fire of his memory burning.Īt last, in 'Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. If anything, Connell's 'always unpredictable and uncommonly varied' literary output kept him from being easily branded and therefore from being a consistent commercial success. His range, deftly executing everything from the deeply interior and unsettling first-person novel 'Diary of a Rapist' (1966) to the almost zany blood-soaked account of the Crusades, 'Deus Lo Volt!,' is astonishing. Connell (1924-2013) has long remained an elusive and under-recognized figure.Įlegantly able to shift among historical pathos, philosophical seriousness and droll humor and irony at the absurdity of the human condition, Connell's gorgeously researched narrative nonfiction work 'Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn,' for instance, is not only one of the best and most nuanced books on that subject, but also a model for writing lively, humane accounts of messy tragedies.

Bridge' (1969) - a pair of pointed and pointilist portraits of the circumscribed lives of a well-to-do and narrowminded suburban family in Kansas City not dissimilar to the one he was raised in - author Evan S. Best known, to the extent that he's known at all, for his linked novels 'Mrs.

Evan s connell books