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Writing on Roth's The Breast
1972. August 2, 1972. Nearly 600 words by Wolff (author of the memoir The Duke of Deception and the Harry Crosby biography Black Sun, among many others) of critical praise for Roth's novel The Breast, written in the form of a typed letter signed to an editor at Holt, Rinehart, Winston. Wolff describes in detail how he tried to resist the story and, in greater detail, the words and sentences that won him over. "It is an odd failing in a reader, odder in a fiction writer, to resist a story of metamorphosis, to resist that word's linguistic kinsman, metaphor. But the drag of what we are pleased to call reality is substantial, and the nature of its attractive power is not the least interesting question raised by this work of fiction...Roth has done...what the Dali painting could never do, suggest how it would feel to become your dream rather than merely see it...Thank you for trusting me with the manuscript." Typed on both sides of one page; folded in fourths for mailing, small corner staple holes; else fine. [#007249] SOLD

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