Paul West

Paul West, a prolific and inventive novelist as well as a beloved teacher of
creative writing, died Sunday at his home in Cayuga Heights. He was 85
years old and had been ill with pneumonia.
The author of more than fifty books, West wrote fiction, nonfiction, literary
criticism, memoir, and three volumes of poetry. The heroes he imagined in
works such as Colonel Mint and Rat Man of Paris were often outsiders-
marginal figures who would not or could not conform to the forces acting on
them, and who paid dearly for their difference. Some were real-life figures
whom West plucked from history and re-imagined in detail in novels such as
Lord Byron's Doctor and The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg.
He frequently expanded on themes of alienation, immersion in dreams, and
the struggle of the individual against an absurd, irrational, or even
threatening universe.
The New York Public Library celebrated West's oeuvre by naming him a
Literary Lion in 1987, and the French government made him a Chevalier of
the Order of Arts and Letters. His many other citations include the 1993
Lannan Prize for Fiction and the 1985 Literature Award from the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. A review in The Boston Globe
called him "a literary high-wire artist, performing awe-inspiring aerial feats
with language while the rest of us gape up at him in dumb amazement."
A native of England, West served as a pilot for the Royal Air Force before he
emigrated to the United States, yet he chose personal rather than
adventuresome life episodes to chronicle in his memoirs. He described the
difficulty of learning to swim as an adult in Out of My Depths: A Swimmer
in the Universe (1983), and recounted his own process of recovery in Stroke
of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery (1995).
West was classically educated, steeped in music and literature, and the
master of an enormous vocabulary. All his verbal erudition, however, was
obliterated in June 2003 by a stroke that damaged the language centers of his
brain. His speech was reduced to a single syllable, "Mem." With his own
determination and the devotion of his wife, poet and nature writer Diane
Ackerman, West fought back against his global aphasia and managed to
write several more books. His wife told her version