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Born in time, by Clifford Thurlow

James Joyce Atril press
Andy Prisney,
Exposición Museo Joyce, Comuna de Trieste, Italia

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      Some writers are born before their time. Others when the time has passed. Timing is everything.

James Joyce’s Ulysses was partially serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920. London publishers didn’t consider the work quite good enough to be included in their lists and the manuscript finally found its way into a limited edition in Paris with financial support from friends and the American-born publisher Sylvia Beach. It rolled off the press on 2 February 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday, and is considered one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century.

On my bookshelf there is a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. After receiving a string of polite rejections for his picaresque novel – the politeness makes it worse, a cloud of depression darkened his mind in and in 1969, at the age of 31, he committed suicide. Toole’s mother, Thelma, salvaged the carbon copy of the manuscript and spent eleven years contacting publishers before her son’s novel was finally accepted by Louisiana State University Press in 1980. It came out with a 2.500 initial print run, was an instant classic, earned Toole a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1981 and eventually sold more than 1.5 million copies.

Toole in A Confederacy of Dunces set out to explain life’s vicissitudes and interpret the modern world from his unique point of view. Similarly, Joyce in Ulysses addresses the changing attitudes towards tradition and family life in 1920’s Ireland. Both writers were looking into the future with feelings of uncertainty and gloom. Their works were rejected by the mainstream media, not through specific inadequacies, but because they identified quirks and transformations in society unnoticed by busy editors in their glass windowed ivory towers.

The unspoken secret for every writer is to be born in time.

Clifford Thurlow Atril press
Clifford Thurlow was born in London and started work as a junior reporter on a local newspaper aged 18. He has travelled extensively through Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. He worked as the editor of the Athens News in Greece, managed a travelling dolphin show in Spain and studied Buddhism in India, leading to the publication of his first book, Stories from Beyond the Clouds, an anthology of Tibetan folk stories.
He met actress Carol White in Hollywood and wrote her memoirs, Carol Comes Home. It was the first of a dozen books as a ghostwriter, including the Sunday Times bestseller Today I’m Alice – the story of multiple personality disorder survivor Alice Jamieson. His latest book, “How to Rob the Bank of England”, was published in September 2024.
www.cliffordthurlow.com

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