Bob Biderman (1940–2018)[1] was a British-American novelist and publisher known for his coming-of-age novels, Red Dreams – an obverse view of 50s America – and Letters to Nanette, about a young man drafted into the army at the start of the Vietnam War.
Biderman is considered one of the wave of literary oppositionists who were active in May 68 and attempted to redefine popular genres, exemplified in his Joseph Radkin Investigation series which combined social and political history in a mystery format.
[2] This experience provided the basis for several of Biderman's novels: Red Dreams,[3] which viewed the brutalities of McCarthy's America through the eyes of a child and the first of his Radkin mysteries, Strange Inheritance.
[2] Biderman's interest in writing, politics and cooperative publishing led him to become one of the original organisers of the nascent National Writers' Union (the contradictions of which he discussed in Strange Inheritance) and a vocal critic of the American culture industry.
DeMarco had introduced Biderman to Pete Ayrton, who at the time was editing this list and in 1984, Pluto Press published Strange Inheritance, the first of what was to become the Joseph Radkin Investigations series.
Biderman returned to the States where he and his family took up residence in Portland, Oregon as cheap housing there became a magnet for struggling artists no longer able to afford San Francisco.
It was in Portland that Biderman wrote the final two books in the Radkin series – Paper Cuts, concerning the clear-cutting of the great redwood forests and Mayan Strawberries, about the Mixtec Indians who travelled north from Guatemala to work the Oregon agricultural harvest.
As Biderman explained it, their return to the United States had been 'sort of a last chance saloon – an attempt to reconnect with our American roots before finally succumbing to the realisation that we were, for better or worse, expatriates.
[12] In 1996, along with David Kelley, a fellow at Trinity College, he began Black Apollo Press 'as a way of connecting to the bohemian subculture – hoping to create a Rive Gauche on the River Cam'.
Along with his son, Kevin Biderman and French colleagues, Yann Perreau and Marc Hatzfield, he helped develop the Visions of the City Project which sought to explore the emergence of new urban constructs as places of connection, refuge and regeneration.