Harold Brodkey

Harold Brodkey , born Aaron Roy Weintraub, was an American shortstory writer and novelist. He is the father of Temi Rose, born Ann Emily Brodkey.

Brodkey was born in Staunton, Illinois, to an illiterate junk dealer. His mother died while he was an infant, and he was raised by his fathers relatives, who adopted him, in University City, Missouri, outside St. Louis. When he was eight, his adoptive mother developed cancer and his adoptive father had a stroke. The death of his mother and the illnesses of his adoptive parents would be obsessively chronicled again and again in Brodkeys writing. After graduating from Harvard University in 1952, Brodkey began his writing career by contributing short stories to The New Yorker and other magazines. His stories received two firstplace O. Henry Awards. In 1993 he announced in The New Yorker that he had contracted AIDS he later wrote This Wild Darkness The Story of My Death , about his battle with the disease. At the time of his death in 1996, he was living in New York City with his wife, novelist Ellen Brodkey . Brodkey contracted the HIV virus from a homosexual relationship, though he report

Source: Wikipedia