Dick Gibson Show

Stanley Elkin (1930-1995) was an award-winning author of novels, short stories, and essays. Born in the Bronx, Elkin received his BA and PhD from the University of Illinois and in 1960 became a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis where he taught until his death. His critically acclaimed works include the National Book Critics Circle Award-winners George Mills (1982) and Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995), as well as the National Book Award finalists The Dick Gibson Show (1972), Searches and Seizures (1974), and The MacGuffin (1991). His book of novellas, Van Gogh's Room at Arles, was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award.

“Stanley Elkin’s third novel, The Dick Gibson Show...squeezes the blackheads behind the ears of your imagination; it’s a Diane Arbus walk on the unreconciled side. It’s among the most powerful and funny American novels I know....it’s worth noting how fully this novel, which is set mostly in the two decades after World War II, anticipates the daily purge that is the internet, its mille-feuille layers of outrage and heartbreak....The contents of Elkin’s novel leave you a bit sick. His talent leaves you wasted, too. This book is a landslide of language, and it’s unfair, somehow, that so many gifts were bestowed on one writer…"