“Greatest American Novelist” Dies, Almost Unnoticed
I’ll admit it: I’ve never read any of Theodora Keogh‘s nine novels, and chances are, given what little I know about the demographics of this blog’s readership, you haven’t, either. But Ned Rorem has said Keogh, who died earlier this month in North Carolina, was “our best American writer, certainly our best female writer,” and the descriptions of her early work in the obituary in London’s Telegraph sound like a cross between Dawn Powell and Jim Thompson, two great tastes I never would have imagined tasting great together (with the possible exception of American Psycho, though I don’t know that Bret Easton Ellis would embrace either comparison). Sadly, Keogh’s work is out of print, and appears to have been published primarily as pulp fiction, so the libraries probably aren’t going to have copies lying around…
So far, if Google News is anything to go by, the only American newspaper to mark her passing was The Charlotte Observer, which published an all too vague appraisal last week, hinting at more knowledge than it’s willing to share. The Telegraph, despite being on the other side of the Atlantic, offers much more biographical detail, including this bittersweet closer: “Theodora Keogh, who died in North Carolina on January 5, spent her final years in a house set in 19 acres. She loved cats, but gave up keeping chickens as they were eaten by coyotes.”
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