Life
Haldeman was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. His family traveled and he lived in Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Bethesda, Maryland and Anchorage, Alaska as a child. Haldeman married Mary Gay Potter, known as "Gay", in 1965. He received a BS degree in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Maryland in 1967. That same year he was drafted into the Army and served as a combat engineer in Vietnam. He was wounded in combat and his wartime experience was the inspiration for War Year, his first novel; also later books such as "The Hemingway Hoax" and "Old Twentieth" deal extensively with the experience of combat soldiers in Vietnam and other wars. In 1975, he received an MFA degree in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He resides in Gainesville, Florida and Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches writing at MIT. In addition to being an award-winning writer, Haldeman is a painter. In 2009 and 2010, he was hospitalized for pancreatitis.
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“Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.”
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“There is in him, hidden deep-down, a great instinctive artist, and hence the makings of an aristocrat. In his muddled way, held back by the manacles of his race and time, and his steps made uncertain by a guiding theory which too often eludes his own comprehension, he yet manages to produce works of unquestionable beauty and authority, and to interpret life in a manner that is poignant and illuminating.”
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