Door Way

Norbert Blei (1935–2013) is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for fiction and the author of seventeen books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, including Meditations on a Small Lake, Door Steps, and his “Chicago Trilogy”: Neighborhood, Chi Town, and The Ghost of Sandburg’s Phizzog. Born and raised in Chicago, he wrote for the City News Bureau before moving in 1969 to Door County, Wisconsin, where he became writer-in-residence at the Clearing Folk School. He was also the founder and publisher of the small literary press Cross+Roads Press.

“Someday [Blei’s] Door County will join the great mythical-real landscapes that include Salinas, Spoon River, and Yoknapatawpha.”—Harry Mark Petrakis|“Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heard and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.”—Sydney J. Harris|“Blei’s friends and neighbors have not escaped the world; they are very much a part of it, involved in the vital issues of our times.”—Publishers Weekly|“Blei has a fine ear and a genuine, searching, feeling humanity.”—Chicago Tribune|“A fascinating assemblage of profiles that adds up to a vivid, feeling portrait of a region.”—Studs Terkel|“Blei’s finely wrought story of a Door County car salesman . . . is just one of the Door Way stories that put Blei in the ranks of Faulkner et alia.”—River Falls Journal