The Almanac Branch (36 page)

In 1981, Morrow launched the literary journal
Conjunctions
. His taste, passion, and editorial savvy quickly attracted a diverse slate of contributing writers and editors, including Chinua Achebe, John Ashbery, and Joyce Carol Oates. The novelist Robert Coover has called the publication “without exception, America's leading literary journal, one of the greatest such magazines in the literary history of the country.”

After years of contributing to anthologies and supporting the work of others in his role as editor, Morrow published his first novel,
Come Sunday
, in 1988. Morrow's debut set the tone for his later works with its rich historical allusion, globe-spanning plotlines, lyrical prose, and illuminating philosophical exploration. Morrow's second novel,
The Almanac Branch
(1991), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and highlighted the author's interest in the complex interior lives of his characters. The tone of his work is often Gothic, especially in
Giovanni's Gift
(1997), which was partly inspired by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Morrow meticulously researches his fiction: For his diptych consisting of
Trinity Fields
(1995) and
Ariel's Crossing
(2002), the author interviewed special ops veterans from the U.S. engagement in Laos, students involved in the Columbia University riots, and Manhattan Project scientists, among others. He even lived for a time near Los Alamos—where atomic weapons were first tested—to better understand the characters in his sweeping historical sagas of American life in the atomic age.

Aside from his work as an editor and writer, Bradford Morrow has taught writing and literature throughout his career, which has included positions at Brown, Columbia, Princeton, and the Naropa Institute. He currently lives in New York and is a professor of literature at Bard College, which sponsors
Conjunctions
.

“Lois Hoffman and Ernest Morrow, my parents-to-be, standing in front of the Luscombemy father flew them in on their first date in 1949. My father was a pilot and the owner of a Harley-Davidson that he regularly drove from Oak Creek, Colorado, over the continental divide to Denver, where Lois lived at the time, an all-day drive on his cycle.”

“Age one, striking something of an authorial pose with the forefinger to the cheek. I remember those curtains, very Western in theme with the cattle and other cowboy imagery.”

“Looking at this photograph, it's really those narrative Western-themed curtains behind me that I find most interesting now. I remember staring at them and inventing stories in the drapery. This was in our house on Cove Way in Denver, Colorado.”

“The
H.M.S. Pinafore
outfit that I wore on one of my two youthful outings as a thespian (the other being Gilbert & Sullivan's other workhorse operetta,
The Mikado
). My mother made the costume from scratch, right down to the epaulettes and medals. I still have this outfit in a box somewhere and the bookcase, too. Littleton, Colorado.”

“Me as a grinning Cub Scout in Littleton, Colorado. I would go on to become an Eagle Scout and must confess that the Boy Scouts at that time—in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains where we went camping, sometimes in the dead of winter, and hiking through difficult terrain, learning the flora and fauna, as well as all sorts of real survival skills—is a part of my youth I now cherish.”

“I'm standing here with a group of beautiful young children somewhere in the mountains south of Comayagua, Honduras, in 1966, when I was serving as a medical assistant for Amigos de lasAméricas. This Peace-Corps-like experience in the second-poorest country in the hemisphere (after Haiti, at the time) absolutely changed my life. When this photo was taken, I had just finished inoculating the entire school body of this little village against smallpox and other diseases.”

“On the beach near Genoa, Italy, visiting the host family with whom I spentmy senior year in high school when I was a foreign exchange student living in Cuneo, not far from there. I lived with the Delpiano family: Minu and Aldo, my host parents, and Dario, Andrea, and the youngest brother, Davide, who's sitting here beside me, in 1970 or so.”

“In Littleton, Colorado, visiting my parent's house from the University of Colorado in Boulder. From the left: my beloved Grandfather Hoffman, who was a farmer in Red Cloud, Nebraska, until he lost everything in the Great Depression; my mother holding his hand; me in the middle with a pensive or else depressed look on my face (basically my mind must have been elsewhere); my equally beloved grandmother, Jenny Hoffman, to whom I attribute some of my storytelling skills; and my sister Deborah. Around 1972.”

“In my early twenties, camping somewhere in the Colorado mountains.”