http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2013/may/11/james-patterson-life-in-writing
James Patterson: a life in writing
‘If I told my publishers I was writing only one book this year, rather than 10, they would have a heart attack’
Nicholas Wroe
The Guardian, Friday 10 May 2013
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As a high school valedictorian in one of the best Catholic schools in the area Patterson applied to both Harvard and Yale. “But I never even heard from them. Then I was told I had been accepted at Manhattan College, which was a Christian Brothers college I had not applied for. It turned out the brothers had never actually sent off my applications. Actually Manhattan College was fine and was where Rudy Giuliani went. But in those days if you were Catholic you went to a Catholic college.”
Although a star pupil at school, he only read enough “to get out of Newburgh”. It was not until his family moved to near Boston, just before he started college, and he took a part-time job at a mental hospital that he started to “read my brains out. And not commercial fiction. Stuff that really stretched me: The Tin Drum; One Hundred Years of Solitude. Working nights meant I was paid overtime and I’d go into Cambridge and buy maybe 10 books a week. The hospital was used by a lot of wealthy families, which was also a new socio-economic thing for me. And it had an artistic tradition: Robert Lowell was there for a while; Ray Charles used to check in; James Taylor; Sylvia Plath had been there before my time. There was a tradition of wonderful craziness.”
He left Manhattan College with an English degree and enrolled on an MA programme at Vanderbilt University. But after receiving a “lucky” high number in the Vietnam draft lottery, in 1971 he took a job in advertising at J Walter Thompson. “I never particularly liked advertising and it hadn’t been anything I’d had in mind.” But he says the job was right for him when his long-term girlfriend developed a brain tumour and subsequently died. “I wanted no time by myself so I threw myself into work and went from creative director to running the company in two and a half years.” Patterson was instrumental in award-winning campaigns for companies such as Kodak, Burger King and Toys R Us. But throughout this time he also wrote. It was while working at the mental hospital that he had first started “scribbling and found that I loved it. It seemed I was never going to produce a Ulysses or One Hundred Years of Solitude – although maybe I sell myself a little short in terms of magic realism, which I think I maybe could’ve done in an interesting way. But somewhere along the way I read Day of the Jackal and The Exorcist. I hadn’t read much commercial fiction, but I liked these and thought I maybe could do books that people turn the pages of.”
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[JR: I don't cite a lot of James Patterson news because it boring boilerplate. I found this one interesting because it comes out he didn't apply to Alma Mater. How did that work? And, the quoted reference to "lucky" with respect to the Draft. I was drafted and didn't make it the lottery. As were many of my fellow Classmates. Some went to Canada, some went underground, some were drafted, and some never came back from their service. Either physically or mentally. How many more "James Patterson's" did we lose? I wouldn't have put "lucky" in quotes. I think Americans will carry the "curse" of that era for as long as we carry the "curse" of the War of Northern Aggression. Any way I found this article interesting and informative; as well as provocative and saddening.]
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