E.M. Nathanson, 'The Dirty Dozen' Author, Dies At 87

The Hollywood Reporter notes that author E.M. Nathanson has died.

E.M. Nathanson, who wrote the 1965 novel The Dirty Dozen that was adapted for the film starring Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine, has died. He was 87.

Nathanson died Tuesday of heart failure in Laguna Nigel, Calif., his longtime friend Frank McAdams told The Hollywood Reporter.

Nathanson is best known for the Dirty Dozen, the story of 12 convicted servicemen — robbers, murderers, rapists — who are sent off on a suicide mission to blow up a chateau of German generals just before D-Day with the promise that those who survive will have their sentences commuted.

The novel was inspired by the supposedly true story of some World War II criminal soldiers who got the nickname the Dirty Dozen (or Filthy Thirteen, depending on the source) for their refusal to bathe and who were said to have been sent off on a similar mission. Nathanson heard the story from his friend, producer Russ Meyer (Valley of the Dolls), who said he learned of the yarn while working as a combat photographer during World War II.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/em-nathanson-dead-dirty-dozen-881401?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=THR%20Breaking%20News_now_2016-04-06%2011:15:48_ehayden&utm_term=hollywoodreporter_breakingnews

The Book-Writing Machine: Len Deighton's 'Bomber' Was The First Novel Written On A Word Processor

Matthew Kirschen at Slate wrote an interesting piece about the first novel written on a word processor:

Would best-selling novelist Len Deighton care to take a walk? It was 1968, and the IBM technician who serviced Deighton’s typewriters had just heard from Deighton’s personal assistant, Ms. Ellenor Handley, that she had been retyping chapter drafts for his book in progress dozens of times over. IBM had a machine that could help, the technician mentioned. They were being used in the new ultramodern Shell Centre on the south bank of the Thames, not far from his Merrick Square home.

A few weeks later, Deighton stood outside his Georgian terrace home and watched as workers removed a window so that a 200-pound unit could be hoisted inside with a crane. The machine was IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), sold in the European market as the MT72. “Standing in the leafy square in which I lived, watching all this activity, I had a moment of doubt,” the author, now 84, told me in a recent email. “I was beginning to think that I had chosen a rather unusual way to write books.”
 

Today, of course, many—surely most—fiction writers work with computers, laptops, and word processors just like the rest of us. Literary scholarship generally credits Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi with being the first manuscript submitted to a publisher in typewritten form. Would it be possible, I wondered when I began my research into the literary history of word processing a year and a half ago, to locate a corresponding first for the digital age? The answer turns out to be the book Deighton published in 1970 with the aid of the MTST: a curiously apropos novel about World War II, titled Bomber.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/03/len_deighton_s_bomber_the_first_book_ever_written_on_a_word_processor.html

You cam also read an earlier post on Len Deighton via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/02/happy-belated-birthday-to-thriller.html 

A Farewell To Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition

Martin Rubin at the Washington Times offers a good review of the new edition of Ernest Hemingway's classic novel, A Farewell to Arms.

Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” stands, more than 80 years after its first appearance, as a towering ornament of American literature. Seeing this new edition of the great classic novel, with the very same cover that adorned it back in 1929, is somehow moving; how much more so it must be for its publisher then and now.

 

“A Farewell to Arms” is one of those texts that transcends its impetus. Yes, it is undeniably a powerful denunciation and expose of the horrors of war, specifically World War I, as is clear from Hemingway’s passionate introduction to a new edition reprinted in this volume. Written shortly after another equally but differently terrible global conflict, it seethes with his hatred of war. But it radiates something else as well, a different kind of passion — for creativity, for writing, for spinning the gold of literature out of his experience.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/3/book-review-a-farewell-to-arms-the-hemingway-libra/