Chandler Brossard

With a challenging style and outsider characters, Brossard had limited critical success in the United States.

Both their mother Therese and father were from educated Mormon elite and upper-middle-class families who were major landowners in the area.

[2] Brossard started as a copy boy at The Washington Post at the age of 18, and began writing as a reporter.

[3] Brossard's first novel, Who Walk in Darkness (1952), portrayed the bohemian life of the late 1940s Greenwich Village; it was first published by Gallimard in France.

Through it, Brossard became associated with early Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but he believed that he was on a different path.

[4]More recently, the novel has been characterized as existential, closer to works such as Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Albert Camus' L'Étranger (1942).

After his first novel, Brossard received little critical recognition for his fiction in the United States, as he had "an unconventional style and characters.

[2] Brossard tended to write about characters who were outsiders: "thieves, chimney sweeps, harlots, counterculture activists..." and used the idiomatic language of mostly spoken voice.

[2] He has been described as under appreciated in his home country,[3] as his works were considered difficult; they were better received abroad, particularly in France.

[6] A special 1987 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, guest edited by Steven Moore, was devoted to a critical examination of his work.

[2]His shorter fiction from 1971 to 1991 was collected and published posthumously by Sun Dog Press under the title Over the Rainbow?

[6] The Greek-British writer Alexis Lykiard described Who Walk In Darkness (1952), The Bold Saboteurs (1953) and The Double View (1960) as "landmarks of the postwar American novel".