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About this page

This page began sometime around 1997, when I first got hooked up to the web. Like many people, I spent several days typing the names of my favorite writers, musicians and artists into various search engines to see what was out there. And I discovered the wonderful gumbo of trivia, information, rumor and lies that is the internet. Although I could find websites devoted to nearly any obscure artist I could think of, I was surprised to find absolutely nothing on my favorite novelist: Don Carpenter.

I didn't know much about Don Carpenter. I hadn't even been able to track down all his books yet at that point. A couple years earlier I had been shocked to read that he had taken his own life. The two-line Associated Press item I'd come across had not offered much in the way of either career summation or speculation as to the cause of his suicide. I assumed at the time (quite romantically, and as it turns out, mistakenly) that Carpenter had been driven to self-destruct by the failure of the world to recognize his genius.

I knew that Carpenter had been close with Richard Brautigan, who had enjoyed a brief vogue in the late 60s, when his work became linked with the budding counterculture and youth movements. However, as "flower power" faded into the disillusionment of the 70s and the cold greed of the 80s, Brautigan's audience began to dwindle. Never taken seriously by critics and lost in ego and alcohol, Brautigan had committed suicide in his Bolinas home in 1984. 

Don Carpenter, on the other hand, was my youthful ideal of what a writer could be in the 90s. He was virtually unknown outside of the relatively tiny world of obsessive readers and writers, but he published regularly, and I guessed that between his books and his work for Hollywood, he probably made enough to get by on. Gazing at the jacket covers on his later novels, I saw an older man with a good-humored grin. Far from the serious-looking young guy pictured on his earlier books, he looked (I imagined) like a man who had come to terms with his own youthful ego and ambition. Perhaps he would not revolutionize the novel, or crack the bestseller lists. Perhaps there would be no lengthy pontifications on "the craft" to the New Yorker. Instead, he would quietly, steadily turn out good work. 

In those days, I actually thought you could peer into the soul of a man by looking at the dust jacket cover. But then, I was trying to be a writer then as well, living in ugly rooms and working awful jobs in various cities around the country, and I needed plenty of fantasy in order to sustain my fading hopes. Carpenter's work always sustained me. He seemed to have a kind of exclusive glimpse into the fumbling desperation of people's lives. His books resonated with a secret truth for me. A truth that was often ugly and terribly sad, yet contained a strong, almost painful beauty in its uncovering. There was also a tenderness there, and a compassion that was never condescending. His prose was deceptively simple: tough and romantic, tender and terse all at once. I read a lot and liked a lot of writers, but no one quite reached into me the way Don Carpenter did.

So, I didn't know what to make of his suicide. Maybe I had it all wrong, I thought. Maybe he did hunger for accolades and riches. Maybe he got fed up. It of course never occurred to me that the reasons might be well beyond my ability to glean from his writing and his dust jacket photos. I did not know about the illness he had struggled with, one that had robbed a fiercely independent man of his freedom and mobility, and – perhaps most cruelly of all for a writer – his sight. I had no way of knowing that for some, suicide can be a way of taking back control of a life, of even honoring life. 

I started The Don Carpenter Page with the intention of doing something to prevent an important American writer from slipping into total obscurity. I was also hoping to attract other fans who might know more than I did – which was almost nothing. The response was heartening. I heard from and corresponded with fans old and new, old friends and classmates of Don Carpenter's, and several members of his immediate family, all of whom were generous with stories, anecdotes, photos and more. I am most in debt to the efforts of Bonnie Howard, Don Carpenter's daughter, without whom this page would be little more than an introduction. 

Unfortunately, my own life got increasingly messy and complicated during the late 90s and the Don Carpenter Page went un-updated for about 6 years straight. Perhaps this was the reason Yahoo decided to yank it. I could never get a straight answer out of anyone, but one day in Fall of 2004, the Don Carpenter Page vanished, taking with it all the photos and text that I, in my infinite organizational deficiency, had somehow failed to back up.

However, it turned out that Yahoo's inexplicable deleting of the page was the kick in the pants it took to get me going on updating it again. All these years later, there are still no other websites devoted to Don Carpenter online. And though I'm somewhat starting from scratch (and my html skills are no more advanced than they were in 1997), I can't allow my favorite writer to have no web presence at all. I don't know what ultimate fate history has in store for Don Carpenter's work. Maybe he'll remain, for those of us lucky enough to have found his books, "our little secret". As I write this, not a single book of his remains in print, but thanks to amazon.com and Ebay, I now have a complete collection of his work. I have read and re-read those books over the years, and there is not a weak one among them. As I get older, they get better. While the work of many of his more acclaimed contemporaries begins to seem somewhat thin and dated, Carpenter's books stand, as Hemingway once said, "Without tricks and without cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards."

And I'm grateful he stuck around long enough to leave us that much.

                                                                           -- Chris
                                                                               Fall, 2004

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