Chester Anderson
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Chester Anderson | |
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| Born | Chester Valentine John Anderson August 11, 1932 Stoneham, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | April 11, 1991 (aged 58) |
| Other names | C.V.J. Anderson John Valentine |
| Education | University of Miami |
| Occupation(s) | Novelist, poet, editor |
Chester Valentine John Anderson (August 11, 1932 – April 11, 1991) was an American novelist, poet, and editor in the underground press.
Biography
Raised in Florida, he attended the University of Miami from 1952 to 1956, before becoming a beatnik coffee house poet in Greenwich Village and San Francisco's North Beach. As a poet, he wrote under the name C.V.J. Anderson and edited the little magazines Beatitude and Underhound. In journalism, he specialized in rock and roll. In that area, he was a friend of Paul Williams and edited Crawdaddy! for a few issues in 1968-1969.
He also wrote science fiction, because of Michael Kurland.[citation needed] Anderson's The Butterfly Kid is the first part of what is called the Greenwich Village Trilogy, with Kurland writing the second book (The Unicorn Girl) and the third volume (The Probability Pad) written by T.A. Waters. The novel was nominated for the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novel. It, and his few other genre works are associated with New Wave science fiction.
He was also a gifted musician, played two-part inventions with two recorders simultaneously, played duets with Laurence M. Janifer at the Cafe Rienzi. He subsequently moved to San Francisco during the Summer of Love and, along with Claude Hayward, was one of the founders of the Communications Company (ComCo), the "publishing arm" of the anarchist guerrilla street theater group The Diggers,[1] having bought a mimeograph with his second royalty check from Butterfly Kid.[2] Through ComCo, he circulated a number of his own bitter broadside polemics in Haight-Ashbury, including "Uncle Tim's Children," with its infamous, often-quoted line, "Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street."[3] Joan Didion described the role Chester Anderson and ComCo played in Haight-Ashbury in her 1968 book Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
After his stint with Crawadaddy! he was connected for a brief period with the underground newspaper Tuesday's Child and with Peace Press, a small movement print shop in Los Angeles.
He published two works, both of them thinly disguised memoirs (one under the pseudonym John Valentine) with Paul Williams' Entwhistle Books.
Prior to his death in 1991, he lived for a number of years in Mendocino, California, where he collaborated with local artist Charles Marchant Stevenson on his book Fox and Hare: The Story of a Friday Evening. A number of science fiction and publishing personalities, including Norman Spinrad and Lou Stathis, posed on location for the illustrations in this book, which attempted to recreate a particular evening in Greenwich Village in the 1960s.[citation needed]
Bibliography
- (poems) Colloquy (San Francisco: Bolerium Books, 1960) — Hand-set & printed at The Bread & Wine Press by Harvey Wilder Bentley, San Francisco; Self-published by the poet
- (poems) A Liturgy for Dragons and 17 Other Poems: 1953-1961 (New York: Chas. P. Young Company, 1961)
- The Pink Palace (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1963)
- (with Michael Kurland) Ten Years to Doomsday (Pyramid Publications, 1964)
- The Butterfly Kid (Pyramid Books, 1967)
- (editor) Growing Up in Minnesota: Ten Writers Remember Their Childhoods (University of Minnesota Press, 1976) ISBN 978-0816607655
- (as John Valentine) Puppies (Entwhistle Books, 1979)
- The Fox and Hare: The Story of a Friday Evening (Entwhistle Books, 1980) ISBN 9780960142897 — illustrated by Charles Marchant Stevenson
Further reading
- "Chester Anderson," Contemporary Authors Online, Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale. Online. GaleNet. Accessed 12-12-2006.
- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, page 29.
- Anderson, Chester. "Foreword", The Butterfly Kid (Pyramid Books, 1967). Stolen Apples - Arts Blog. 08-28-2009. Accessed 06-17-2010.
- Dryer, Thorne. "Les marchands", Anarchisme et non-violence, n°11/12 (janvier/février 1968). La Presse Anarchiste. 10-30-2007. Accessed 06-17-2010.
- Williams, Paul. "Introduction: the making of Fox & Hare". Excerpts. Accessed 06-17-2010.
- Braunstein, Peter & Doyle, Michael William. "28. Chester Anderson", Imagine nation: the American counterculture of the 1960s and '70s. Routledge. 2001. Page 98. Accessed 06-17-2010.
References
- ^ "The Communication Company -- Publishing Arm of the Diggers". The Diggers Archive. Archived from the original on 2011-07-21. Retrieved 2010-12-07.
- ^ Anderson, Chester. "Letter To Thurl" Chester Anderson (1932- ) Papers (ca. 1963-1980). Accessed 03-31-2011
- ^ "Com/Co Biblio". diggers.org. Retrieved 2017-07-25.
External links
- Template:Worldcat id
- Fantastic fiction
- Chester Anderson at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Interview with Paul Williams mentioning him
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
- 1932 births
- 1991 deaths
- 20th-century American novelists
- 20th-century American male writers
- American alternative journalists
- American magazine editors
- American male novelists
- American music journalists
- Novelists from Massachusetts
- American science fiction writers
- University of Miami alumni
- People from Stoneham, Massachusetts
- People from Mendocino, California
- 20th-century American non-fiction writers
- American male non-fiction writers