Keith Botsford

Keith Botsford was born March 29th 1928 in Brussels, Belgium. He is in an American/European writer, Professor Emeritus at Boston University, and current editor of News from the Republic of Letters.[1]

Biography

Keith Botsford was born in Belgium of an expatriate American father and an Italian mother. He grew up in a trilingual house, and was educated in England. His father returned to the United States early in 1939, and together with his mother and brother, the Botsfords were expelled from Italy on the outbreak of World War II.

Thereafter, Keith Botsford was educated in California, and, after 1941, at Portsmouth Abbey in New England [2]. Keith Botsford was briefly attracted to the monastic life, but then continued his education at Yale University, which he left in 1946 to enlist in the US Army, where he served in counter-intelligence. He finished his formal university education at the University of Iowa (A.B., 1950) and at Yale with a Masters in French Literature (A.M., 1952).

In a long career marked by his varied interests, Botsford then studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music, Japanese at Columbia University, the law at Holborn College in London. He was attracted to music and composed a number of chamber works, a ballet, choral music and part-songs. With John Houseman, he worked in film, theater and television.

Keith Botsford's academic career, often combined with administrative tasks, began at Bard College in 1953, where he met his lifelong friend Saul Bellow.[3] In 1958, after two years in Europe living off translation, Keith Botsford became Asst. to the Rector of the University of Puerto Rico, taught Comparative Literature, founded the Honors Program and directed the University of Puerto Rico's television program.

In 1962, Keith Botsford was invited by his University of Iowa friend, John Hunt, to join the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Keith Botsford worked with the Congress for Cultural Freedom spending three years in Latin America while based in Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City.

In 1965, Keith moved back to England to become Deputy International Secretary of International P.E.N., where he organized the Bled Round Tables, the first to which Soviet writers were invited.

After serving at P.E.N., Keith Botsford was invited to become the Director of the Ford Foundation’s National Translation Center[4] at the University of Texas, Austin (1965-1970), where he also was Professor of English.

In 1971, Keith Botsford returned to England where he began a twenty-year career as a sports journalist with The Sunday Times. He also became a Feature Writer and columnist on Gastronomy for The Independent, which he joined in its first week. In addition, Keith Botsford was also a features writer and U.S. correspondent for the Italian newspaper La Stampa.

By the late 1970s, Keith Botsford had combined his journalism with a post as Professor of Journalism and Lecturer in History at Boston University and a position as Asst. to the President John Silber.

Keith Botsford retired as Professor Emeritus, Boston University in 2006. He now lives with his wife in Costa Rica in a prize-winning house on the Carribean coast [5] designed by his architect son, Gianni Botsford.[6]

Botsford has been married three times and has eight living children and sixteen grandchildren.[7]

Career

Botsford’s work as a novelist is divided into two periods: the first four novels – The Master Race [1955], The Eighth-best-dressed-Man in the World [1957], Benvenuto [1961] and The March-Man [1964] – were either semi-autobiographical or political in nature; his later books (after he returned to fiction in 1989) include three major autobiographical works: O Brother! [2000], The Mothers [2002], and Death and the Maiden [2007] form a coherent trilogy about his brother, his early wives (and mothers) and, in the last, a reprise of The March-Man, his father.[8] During this second period he also published a series of stories and novellas, described as ‘imaginary biographies’, collected in Out of Nowhere [2000]. At the same time he also wrote five non-fiction books on sporting figures and four crime and espionage novels under the pseudonym I.I. Magdalen.

It is often asserted in reviews and by his literary friends around the world that Keith Botsford deserved a far wider audience than he enjoyed. His early literary career was in fact marked by ill-fortune (the loss of an early manuscript, the suicide of an editor) and the need to support his many children and wives. His later career was not helped, either, by the incurie of his last publisher, the Jerusalem-based Toby Press and by the seismic shift in the publishing industry away from the so-called ‘literary novel.’

Recognition

Rockefeller Foundation Grant, Moody Foundation Grant, ATA Translation Prize

Published works

Books

Collaboration (2007)

Death and the Maiden (2007)

Emma H. (Toby Press, 2003)

The Mothers (Toby Press, 2002)

Lennie & Vance & Benji (Toby Press, 2002)

Sixth From 1939 (Toby Press, 2002) by Keith Botsford and Marcella Olschki

Editors: The Best of Five Decades (Toby Press, 2001) edited by Keith Botsford and Saul Bellow

Out of Nowhere (Toby Press, 2000)

Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present (Harvard Univ. Press, 1999) by Keith Botsford, Lucetta Scaraffia, and Zarri Lucetta

The Champions of Formula 1 (Arrow Books Ltd., 1989)

Keke (Hutchinson, 1985) by Keith Botsford and Keke Rosberg

Anna P. (Toby Press, 1983)

The Search for Anderson or Anderson Minor (St. Martins Press, 1982)

Driving Ambition (Atheneum, 1981) by Keith Botsford and Alan Jones

Dominguin: Spain's Greatest Bullfighter (Quadrangle Books, 1972)

The March-Man (Viking, 1964)

Benvenuto (Hutchinson, 1961)

The Eighth-Best Dressed Man in the World (Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1957)

The Master Race (Wingate,1955)

Short stories

“Francoise” (Toby Press, 2000), “Mister Zeiss” (Toby Press, 2000), “Grievances” (Toby Press, 2000), “The Town of Luck” (Grand Street Magazine, no. 52, p178), =“Along the River Plate” (Toby Press, 2000), “Olga & Snow” (Toby Press, 2000), “O Brother” (Toby Press, 2000)

INTRODUCTION: Ceremony in Lone Tree (Bison Books, 2001) by Wright Morris Introduction by Keith Botsford

Translations

The House of Others (Northwestern Univ. Press, 1995) by Silvio D'Arzo Translated by Keith Botsford Inevitable Illusions (John Wiley & Sons, 1994) by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini Translated by Keith Botsford

Magazines

Founding Editor Keith Botsford: Delos, Kolokol

Editor

Bostonia, Poetry New York, Grand Prix International, Yale Poetry Review

Contributing Editor

Leviathan, Stand, The Warwick Review

Co-Founding Editors

Keith Botsford and Saul Bellow:

ANON, News from The Republic of Letters, The Noble Savage

Newpaper articles

The Sunday Times of London, The Independent, La Stampa

References

Debrett's People of Today, UK[9] Books [10]

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