Inspiration
The novel grew from Chabon’s concerns with completing an unrealized novel, Fountain City, about the construction of a perfect baseball park in Florida. He decided to write a story about, in part, an author who couldn’t finish his own work. The main character of Grady Tripp is admittedly based on University of Pittsburgh professor, Chuck Kinder, who taught the undergraduate Chabon in the early 80s. Kinder’s great opus, a novel inspired by his friendship with author Raymond Carver, was reportedly more than 3000 pages long at one point. It was finally published in a very slimmed down version in 2001 as Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale.
Read more about this topic: Wonder Boys
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“The ironies in the commonplace are my inspiration and delight.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)