Kirjahaku

There is a quality about Roger Burke the man that makes him the writer that he is and it is an element all too often overlooked by critics who evaluate writers or probe what makes a writer stand out from his peers. The late, great editor Max Perkins understood the mysterious alchemy when he wrote, "The only important things for a writer are loyalty, fortitude, and honor and for a writer to be born knowing that goes at least part of the way to being a great writer." What can be said of Roger Burke body of work? Compared to most writers it isn't large. Ten novels, several which have been lost because there was no computer memory to preserve them, a volume or two of short fiction, several non-fiction books, a volume of essays, which in my mind are as razor sharp as any I know of. This is the age my generation has inherited: so grossly different than we imagined it would be in our early and innocent years. Thus, The Portable Roger Burke is more necessary today than ever.

This is not a story about boxing. It is a story about men who are driven by dreams, some of them inside and some outside the boxing ring. There is a line from one of the key characters in this story that captures its heart: "A man's got to have a dream to keep him from losing his way in life." It is from a father speaking to his son, who is driven by his own dream. Thus, above all this is a story about life as seen and told by one of America's finest fiction writers-although all characters in this tale are real-it is history written with the beating pulse of a novel.