He was notoriously tough on students, and anyone self-proclaimed as sensitive would be gleefully compared to a heavy duty radial tire. His competitiveness was legendary. He was only half-kidding when he expressed pleasure at another writer’s bad reviews and/or poor sales. Yet when he admired something in your work, he’d tell you so in generous terms. And Stanley was deeply romantic and filled with sentiment about the people and places he loved. Nothing made him happier, he said, than to sit in his own living room and look at Joan’s paintings. When I visited him in St. Louis, he pointed out the Gateway Arch with affectionate pride and no jokes about McDonald’s. He accepted his lousy medical lot (a bum heart and progressive MS) because he believed it was outweighed by his passion for life. That passion resonates in his work, even in his darkest fiction.
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Hilma Wolitzer is the author of thirteen books, most recently, Summer and Reading, from Ballantine Books.