On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner w. foreword by Raymond Carver [FIRST EDITION] 1983

On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner with foreword by Raymond Carver

FIRST EDITION [1983] HARPER & ROW

6th printing.  Hardcover with dust jacket in very good condition.

Dust jacket has some visible shelf / rub wear but is otherwise very good; now housed in a new HQ brodart jacket protector. 

Book itself is excellent; pristine cloth boards.  Reads as new. 

On Becoming a Novelist contains the wisdom accumulated during John Gardner's distinguished twenty-year career as a fiction writer and creative writing teacher. With elegance, humor, and sophistication, Gardner describes the life of a working novelist; warns what needs to be guarded against, both from within the writer and from without; and predicts what the writer can reasonably expect and what, in general, he or she cannot. "For a certain kind of person," Gardner writes, "nothing is more joyful or satisfying than the life of a novelist." But no other vocation, he is quick to add, is so fraught with professional and spiritual difficulties. Whether discussing the supposed value of writer's workshops, explaining the role of the novelist's agent and editor, or railing against the seductive fruits of literary elitism, On Becoming a Novelist is an indispensable, life-affirming handbook for anyone authentically called to the profession. "A miraculously detailed account of the creative process."—Anne Tyler, Baltimore Sun