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Thursday 26 April 2018

Typewriters at The MacDowell Colony, 1948

American poet, critic, editor and journalist Amalie (Amy) Bonner was snapped typing on her Underwood faux woodgrain portable when LIFE magazine's famed Fort Dodge, Iowa-born photographer Robert Wayne Kelley (1920-1991) visited The MacDowell Colony artists' retreat in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in July 1948. Kelley's picture spread, headlined "Life visits the MacDowell Colony", appeared in the August 23, 1948, edition of the magazine. The caption under the image of Bonner said she wrote poetry during the morning then served as the colony's librarian to pay for her keep at the retreat. The library contained more than 200 books written by authors who had stayed at The MacDowell Colony, LIFE reported.
Amy Bonner (left as a young woman, and right) was born to a Romanian father and Austrian mother in New York City on February 7, 1891, and grew up in Brooklyn and later lived in Manhattan. A journalist, she reviewed books of verse for the World-Telegram and The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and also worked on the staff of The New York Evening Post. She wrote poetry which appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, starting in 1921. From 1937-47 she served as Poetry’s eastern business representative. She died on December 26, 1955, aged 64
Kelley also photographed Irish authors Mary and Padraic Colum working together of their book Our Friend James Joyce, which wasn't published until 10 years later, in 1958, the year after Mary's death. The couple is using a Remington Noiseless portable.
Mary Gunning Colum (née Maguire) was born on June 15, 1884, in Collooney, County Sligo. Her mother died in 1895, leaving her to be reared by her grandmother Catherine in Ballisodare, Sligo. Mary attended boarding school in Monaghan and went on to University College, Dublin, where she meet W. B. Yeats and founded the Twilight Literary Society and co-founded The Irish Review with her future husband. She married Padraic Colum in July 1912, and they moved to New York in 1914. The couple spent 1930-33 in Paris and Nice, during which time Mary got to know James Joyce and his family and Padraic became involved in the transcription of Finnegans Wake. Mary served as the literary editor of The Forum magazine from 1933–41 and taught comparative literature with Padraic at Columbia and the University City College of New York from 1941. In middle age she was encouraged to return to writing, and became established as a literary generalist in American journals, including Poetry, Scribner's, The Nation, The New Republic, Freeman, The New York Times Review of Books, The Saturday Review of Books and The Tribune. Mary died on October 22, 1957, in New York City.
Padraic Colum was born in Columcille, County Londford, on December 8, 1881. He was a poet, novelist, dramatist, biographer, playwright, children's author and collector of folklore and one of the leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival. In the early part of the 20th Century he started to write and met a number of the leading Irish writers of the time, including Yeats, Lady Gregory and George William Russell. He also joined the Gaelic League and was a member of the first board of the Abbey Theatre. He became a regular user of the National Library of Ireland, where he met Joyce and the two became lifelong friends. He collected Irish folk songs, and sometimes rewrote them almost in their entirety, including the famous She Moved Through the Fair. He was awarded a prize by Cumann na nGaedheal for his anti-enlistment play, The Saxon Shillin'. His earliest published poems appeared in The United Irishman, a newspaper edited by Arthur Griffith. In America, Colum took up children's writing. At the suggestion of Dr Pádraic Whyte (School of English, Trinity College Dublin) a first edition of Colum's first volume (At the Gateways of the Day) was presented to US President Barack Obama by Taoiseach Enda Kenny on the occasion of Obama's visit to Dublin in 2011. Padraic Colum died in Enfield, Connecticut, on January 11, 1972, aged 90.
I guess Kelley felt he couldn't just take a whole series of shots of authors at their typewriters, so with the novelist Nancy Wilson Ross (1901-86, right) he caught the Olympia, Washington native feeding a chipmunk a peanut butter sandwich from her studio porch. Ross was working on I, My Ancestor at the time. Ross was also an authority on Eastern religions. Other writers at The MacDowell Colony at the time Kelley visited were Willa Cather, Thornton Wilder, Elinor Wylie, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Stephen Vincent Benét (below).
The MacDowell Colony,  now 32 studios scattered over 450 acres, was founded in 1907 by Marian MacDowell, pianist and wife of composer Edward MacDowell. She established the institution and its endowment chiefly with donated funds. The mission of the colony is to nurture the arts by offering creative individuals of the highest talent an inspiring environment in which they can produce enduring works of the imagination. Over the years, an estimated 7700 artists have been supported in residence, including the winners of at least 79 Pulitzer Prizes, 781 Guggenheim Fellowships, 100 Rome Prizes, 30 National Book Awards, 26 Tony Awards, 24 MacArthur Fellowships, 9 Grammys, 8 Oscars and 8 National Medals for the Arts. The colony has accepted visual and interdisciplinary artists, architects, filmmakers, composers, playwrights, poets and writers. Wilder wrote Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey there, and Cather wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop
Kelley's image of Marian MacDowell as used in the LIFE spread.
In 1896, Marian Griswold Nevins MacDowell (1857-1956) bought Hillcrest Farm in Peterborough as a summer residence for herself and her husband. The couple formulated a plan to provide an interdisciplinary experience in a nurturing landscape, by creating an institutionalised residential art colony in the area. Edward MacDowell died in 1908, the year after Marian MacDowell had deeded their farm to the Edward MacDowell Association and founded the non-profit organisation The MacDowell Colony. 

Tuesday 24 April 2018

The Typewriters of Françoise Sagan

Richard Polt asked in a comment on yesterday's post, "Which machine is Mlle. Sagan using in those photos? Not her Baby or her '50s Smith-Corona, I think. Could it be a Corona Four?"
I think he is right:

Sunday 22 April 2018

At One With The Machine: The Sanctuary of a Typewriter in a Mechanical Jungle


'At one with the typewriter': Françoise Sagan
A 16-year-old John Rosselli at Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, 1943.
It's more than 60 years now since John Rosselli, the gifted Anglo-Italian historian and musicologist who "brought his intellectual substance to the Guardian", wrote in what was then called the Manchester Guardian about enjoying "a long, almost untroubled love affair with the typewriter". His typewriter was, according to Rosselli, the one notable exception in a life of mishaps with machines as he struggled through a "mechanical jungle". Rosselli said he had "shared a feeling" with the French writer Françoise Sagan (1935-2004, real name Françoise Quoirez) the "charming little monster" who had "wished to feel at one with the machine".
How little has changed in the past six decades! Rosselli's relatively smooth experiences with his typewriter had given him false hope. "The typewriter seems to promise that … I may yet reach a haven at the centre of the mechanical jungle," he wrote. He had grasped that whatever faults the typewriter might have, they were not essential to the machine, but irritants that were "by the way". Through the typewriter, he had over-optimistically come to a "glimpse of what might be" in an advanced mechanical jungle. His dream of a future filled with inscrutable but neutral machines, silent and passive, has in truth come to nothing. "At the back of my mind lurks the image of a world where machines, faultless and amenable every one, will purringly save all that they are meant to of labour and strain." No such luck, old chap! The incomprehensible and hostile are still in charge. In this household, at least, we have difficulties with things as basic as the television remote control, let alone the intricacies of iPhones, tablets and laptops. What makes the motors in our cars tick is an abiding mystery, and even the dials on the oven can confuse me. As for the dishwasher and washing machine ... well, perhaps they don't quite remain objects which evoke some trepidation, but there was a time ...
Carlo Rosselli
By 1958, John Rosselli had suffered years of corresponding problems - that is, with machines of an earlier age. I might hazard a guess that some of his woes were caused by Rosselli losing his father, the hero of the Italian anti-Fascist Resistance Carlo Rosselli, at such an early age. The day after John's 10th birthday, June 9, 1937, Carlo* and his brother Nello were gunned down by "cagoulards", militants of La Cagoule, the secret services of the French Fascist regime, on the orders of Mussolini through Galeazzo Ciano. It's by growing up with handyperson parents that children learn had to attach the correct wires to electrical plugs, and to mend leaking taps. I'm familiar with this process; because I did everything myself, unaided, my own sons are hopeless at this sort of thing.
John Rosselli's younger sister, the great avant-garde poet Amelia Rosselli (1930-96), had shared with her brother a love of typewriters. In Amelia's case, she felt she liked to type as if playing a musical instrument, a "typing Chopin". Amelia composed her poetry on a typewriter, in particular for what has been described as her "harmonious dissonances" from the metric spaces [Spazi Metrici], the metrical experimentation and intertextuality of her poems. In Spazi Metrici (1962), Amelia wrote, "In laying out the first line of the poem I definitively fixed the width of the framework, both spatial and temporal; the subsequent verses had to be adapted to the same degree, to identical formulation."  
Amelia Rosselli
In a letter to John in October 1979, Amelia wrote, "I am writing to you on my not brand new writing machine, bought more than a year ago; it has the faculty of not tiring anything but the back, while neck bothers simply completely disappear, it being heavily sprung (that is of stronger touch, or heavier). I happened to buy it second hand, and it turned out to be a sort of tank from East Germany made they say about 50 years ago. So I type and type on, with great progress to my mind at least, since whatever work comes through is no longer a big worry as to arthritis etc."
The first edition of her Serie Ospedaleria (1969) was printed using a monospace font which resembled a typewriter typeface. It "was the only edition published during Rosselli's lifetime in which she was able to realise her graphic vision for the page. The edition is printed ... to reproduce the visual effect of a typewritten page, wherein each letter occupies an equal space and carries an equal visual 'weight'."
Amelia, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, committed suicide by jumping from her fifth floor apartment window near Rome's Piazza Navona, tragically acting out a play her grandmother had written 90 years earlier, in 1906, L'idea fissa (The Fixed Idea), about a young person who has a dual personality.

Amelia Rosselli's typing
John and Amelia were the grandchildren of Giuseppe Rosselli, a musicologist. and Amelia Pincherle Rosselli (1870-1954, right), a Venetian Jewish feminist, playwright and translator who came from a family prominent in the Florentine Risorgimento. An aunt of the novelist Alberto Moravia (1907-1990, born Alberto Pincherle, image below)Amelia Pincherle married into wealth from the Rosselli family ownership of mercury mines in southern Tuscany. John and Amelia's mother was the former Marion Cave (1896-1949, left, with John as a baby), who was born into a Quaker family in Riseley, Bedfordshire, the daughter of an active socialist and herself a committed socialist.
John and Amelia with Carlo and Nello Rosselli
Alberto Moravia
As for John (in reality Giovanni, and nicknamed "Mirtillino"), he died in Cambridge, England, at the age of 73, on January 16. 2001.  He first met his father, at three months, in a prison in Savona. John grew up in Paris among the political exiles and intellectual grand bourgeois. When France fell to the Nazis in June 1940, Marion Rosselli took her children to England and, after a few months, the United States. In 1942 John went to Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, then Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia, where he took a BA in humanities, was assistant editor of the college newspaper, acted in plays reviewed by W.H. Auden (then a Swarthmore teacher), met a Baltimore Quaker, Nicky Farrar, whom he was to marry a decade later after her divorce from her first husband, and, in 1946, graduated summa cum laude.
John at Swarthmore College, 1946
After the war John returned to England to be with his seriously ill mother. Upon Marion's death in 1949, Amelia suffered a nervous breakdown. John served in the British army - as a sergeant at the port of Trieste - and, after demobilisation, studied for a PhD at Peterhouse College, Cambridge University. His thesis, "Lord William Bentinck and the British Occupation of Sicily, 1811-1814", won the Thirlwall Prize and was published in 1956. By then John had already become a journalist with the Manchester Guardian, as a leader writer in 1951, and was also literary editor from 1953-56. When the Guardian moved to London in 1956, so too did John, as deputy London editor. In 1962 he became features editor.
In the autumn of 1964 John left newspaper work to teach political and cultural history at the then new University of Sussex, ending up as dean of English and American studies from 1983-85. In his third and final phase of life he became a historian of opera. His wife died in 1989 and John moved to a village south of Siena in 1995, and later to Florence. 
*Carlo Rosselli (1899-1937) was a Italian political leader, journalist and historian as well as anti-fascist activist. He developed a theory of reformist, non-Marxist Socialism, inspired by the British Labour movement, that he described as "liberal Socialism". After a daring escape from a Fascist prison in 1929, Carlo made his way to Paris and founded the anti-fascist militant movement Giustizia e Libertà, and in 1936 fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. 

Saturday 21 April 2018

Death of a Gentleman and a Scholar


JOHN NEVILLE TURNER (1936-2018)
Jazz pianist, linguist, sports historian, cricket and football lover, Supreme Court barrister, professor of law, expert on family law and advocate for the legal rights of children.

Sometimes – though, sadly, all too infrequently - one meets someone who, regardless of the brevity of that meeting, leaves an everlasting and very special impression. One such person in my life was John Neville Turner, unquestionably one of the finest characters I am ever likely to encounter. J. Neville passed away on Thursday morning, close to his 82nd birthday, having suffered from vascular dementia for the past 3½ years. He was often referred to by friends as a “Modern Renaissance Man”, a salute to his wide range of interests and expertise, from jazz pianist to sports historian, prolific author, professor of law at Monash University for almost 30 years, expert on family law and an advocate for the legal rights of children. Neville was a solicitor in the Supreme Court of Judicature in England before coming to Australia in the late 1960s. Here he became a barrister in the Supreme Court of Victoria, a lecturer in law at the University of Adelaide for five years, and taught law at universities in Michigan and Nebraska. He spoke five languages, as well as being versed in classical Latin and Greek.
Unsurprisingly, given he was born in Bury in Lancashire, and gained his law degree with honours at Manchester University, his greatest sporting passions were cricket and football. The former is a game of which he was a connoisseur in the absolute literal sense of the word. Anyone who not just tolerates but continues to embrace cricket for as long - and with such intense and unabiding affection - as Neville did, surely needs to be a true connoisseur. Neville was moreover a purist and a traditionalist who found “noise pollution” at cricket matches to be “heinous”. Cricket, Neville felt, should be “a refuge from the vulgarity of the traffic and commerce of early 21st Century freneticism.” Many modern, revamped cricket stadiums were “anti-historical, superfluous, grandiose, grandiloquent, [a] folly which only a modern-day Nero would build” (how he would have hated the loss of the WACA Ground in Perth). In 1993, Neville described one-day cricket, the version shaped to appeal largely to the hoi polloi, the great unwashed, as “a facile perversion of a great art-form” which attracted hooligans, drunks and misfits. “On the other hand, the first-class, extended match offers an authority and beauty that no other game in the world can match.” These were comments which would quickly separate the men from the boys when it comes to genuine cricket love. Neville, indeed, could view cricket as an extension of both art and war. He once presented a paper describing players from the great rivalry between Lancashire and Yorkshire in terms of characters from Shakespeare's War of the Roses plays. Neville attended cricket Tests at 44 grounds around the world and all football World Cups from 1986 to 2010.
In July 1989, Neville presented a paper to an Australian Society of Sports Historians conference asking “Is Sport an Art Form?”, a proposition which was dismissed by one pretentious columnist as tantamount to suggesting “opera for the proletariat”. But the thought was more warmly received by Tony Stephens in The Sydney Morning Herald, who quoted Neville as saying, “Sport is one of the graces of life, a source of infinite joy and productive of the finest cultural values”. Neville had accepted “Tolstoy’s concept of art as the sincere sharing of an emotion that moves the person who expresses it”, and he believed the Australia Council’s mandate should be extended to cover sport as well as music, literature and ballet.
         Thereafter Neville’s name was not seen so much on the news pages; in hindsight it seems as if he’d felt stung by the chilly reception and patently pseudo intellectualism of the conceited columnist (“Paspalum Place”). On the other hand, Neville’s ongoing dislike of modern technology – no computers, no email and no Word Doc for him – quite possibly curtailed his wider influence as the study of sport and sports history tightened into an exclusive academic enclave, a zealously protected school for like minds, their work reading increasingly like what "Paspalum Place" described as onanism. Neville preferred books and primary sources to the insidious, unreliable Internet. He wrote his notes and letters in longhand. As for revolutionary ideas, like sport as art, they came to be frowned upon – after all, it attracted negative publicity.
Ironically, Neville’s passing was announced to a broader audience on the very stage Neville shunned, social media. It came on Facebook, from his great friend and fellow sports historian Bernard Whimpress. This elicited an outpouring of sorrow from the select group of Bernard’s online friends, one of whom referred as Neville as “Nevillepaedia”. Others recalled a gentleman and a true character, a special and an exceptional man, a great “encourager” and contributor, and an entertaining and extremely knowledgeable companion. For all that, Neville was a man people felt they knew, yet knew little about.
Neville’s true fame did not extend much beyond that small circle of those close friends who, through getting to know Neville well, had gained some inkling of his life of achievements. The Neville I knew was quiet, unassuming, humble and modest, though also exceedingly erudite. He was a voice of reason and he was generous and kind, including with his praise (you knew you’d earned it), a impish soul with an irresistible sense of fun. I’m reliably told he was also a marvellous teacher.
It was only through a chance chat in a bar in 2007 that I learned Neville was such an adept at a keyboard. It was talking with a lifewire Ukrainian, Dr Jorge Dorfman Knijnik, a lecturer in physical education and sport at University of São Paulo in Brazil, when Jorge offered to sing one of my favourite tunes, The Girl from Ipanema, at a dinner I was MC-ing in the Great Hall at the Australian National University, and Neville was suggested as an accompanist. I was only too happy to agree to this arrangement, and stopped the pre-recorded soundtrack between Frank Sinatra’s There Used To Be a Ballpark Right Around Here and Roy Harper’s When An Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease for the Jorge-Neville recital. To say Neville astonished the large gathering with his piano playing would be a gross understatement. We were simply flabbergasted that, in the enforced absence of Sinatra and Harper, such a rich talent was in our midst.
Neville went on to play Vangelis’s memorable instrumental Chariots of Fire, the theme music for the movie of the same name, ending his performance with a lavish back-fingered sweep of the wires and proceeding to explain to a room full of sports historians and their partners that the title had nothing whatsoever to do with sport, nor indeed the 1924 Paris Olympic Games. We philistines, we innocently profane many, learned that the words “Chariots of Fire” came from the poem “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time" by William Blake, probably written in 1804, a preface to his epic Milton: A Poem in Two Books, one of a collection of writings known as the Prophetic Books. And that Blake’s words became the hymn Jerusalem, with music written by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916. The poem was inspired by the apocryphal story that a young Jesus, accompanied by Joseph of Arimathea, a tin merchant, travelled to what is now England and visited Glastonbury. The theme is linked to the Book of Revelation, describing a Second Coming, wherein Jesus establishes a New Jerusalem. Blake implies that a visit by Jesus would briefly create heaven in England, in contrast to the "Dark Satanic Mills" of the Industrial Revolution.
In  a way it sounds a bit like postmodernist theory, and I doubt that did much for Neville. Either way, I gather that, because of our night on the town with Bernard Whimpress, which included a bossa nova around a large pile of coats (the first dance in 30 years of sports history conferences), the pair missed the following morning’s presentation on postmodernist theory in the study of sport history. Bernard, by the way, gained some notoriety by adding a typewriter museum to a nunnery as being among places in which he’d slept.
Happily, the one session I’m forever grateful I attended during that 2007 sports history conference was the last one, the one in which J. Neville Turner presented his talk titled “The Half Eaten Pear”. My recollection is that this wasn’t even a scheduled presentation, and that some unfortunate historians, eager to catch flights out of Canberra, missed it. But “The Half Eaten Pear” has, in the past 11 years, developed such a reputation it has almost attained legendary status, at least among sports historians. There are those of us who were there and heard it and those who so earnestly wished they had been there that they have come to believe they were. The talk was a satirical look at the maze of rules of golf as laid down by the Royal and Ancient of St Andrews, so comprehensive and involved that they leave one wondering, “What possible eventuality could they have overlooked?” Well, Neville provided the answers to that question with a paper that readily recalled Evelyn Waugh in his Scoop mood, such was its plausible ridiculousness. In my humble opinion, “The Half Eaten Pear” ranks, among sports talks, right up there with Humphrey Tilling’s famous “Six Ages of Cricket”, given to the Forty Club in London in 1963 (indeed, Neville was probably suitably inspired by the Tilling talk). Neville’s costume manager on the day was Bernard Whimpress, who, since Neville was not golfer himself (though an able tennis player), supplied a broken half-wedge and plus fours.
Back then, Jorge Dorfman Knijnik reminded me of a quote from the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamuurti,  “So when you are listening to somebody completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.” Bernard Whimpress has come to describe Neville’s talk as a “riot”. Yet, as much as everyone there was reduced to tears of laughter, nobody dared miss a single word. And during Neville’s talk, one grasped fully the feeling, and came to gain a precious insight into the character that was John Neville Turner.

Wednesday 18 April 2018

Bob Dylan Gives his Imperial 65 Typewriter a Big Hug as the Day of the Wedge Dawns

Staying on the subject of Nobel Prize in Literature winners and nominees for the time being, I offhandedly asked Harriet the other day, "Who was the last Nobel Prize Laureate to use a typewriter?" I expected and got the answer "Bob Dylan"*. Yes Dylan, the 2016 prize winner, is known to have used a range of typewriters, from a Royal Caravan to an Olympia SG1, an Olivetti Lexikon 80 and Olivetti Lettera 22 and 32 portables. To my surprise, I found Dylan was also seen in Britain in the mid-60s showing inordinate affection for an Imperial 65. (As great a typewriter as the Imperial 65 is, I must confess I've never felt a compulsion to hug one!)
Kazuo Ishiguro at the Nobel Prize presentation dinner in Stockholm.
Strictly speaking, however, we were both wrong, as I subsequently discovered last year's Nobel Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro used a Brother AX-10 electronic typewriter to write his 1989 Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day, as well as the telescript The Gourmet and "the bulk of" The Unconsoled.
Ishiguro bought the "wedge" typewriter at the Ryman Stationery store near Covent Garden in London in 1987 (centre, above). The machine was made at Wrexham in North Wales.

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki on November 8, 1954; his family moved to England in 1960. His 2005 novel Never Let Me Go was named by Time as the best novel of 2005 and included in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. In naming him last year's Nobel Prize Laureate, the Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
Ishiguro has a further "typewriter connection", though tenuous. His father, Shizuo Ishiguro, a physical oceanographer, moved the family to Guildford in Surrey after being invited to research at the National Institute of Oceanography. In 1984 he patented what has been called a kind of "Braille typewriter" - in fact it is "an electronic apparatus for aiding the blind to read ordinary printed letters" (see below).
Kazuo Ishiguro's use of an electronic typewriter may well be seen to signal that time Ted Munk has been warning us about for some years - that what I call "wedges" will "have their day". They might not yet have the same appeal as manual typewriters, but perhaps as the remaining stock of old manuals continues to be exhausted and prices for them keep on skyrocketing, it is not all that far away.
Then again, if some part of the on-going appeal of manual typewriters lies in their use by Nobel Prize-winning authors, our critical question - "Who was the last Nobel Prize Laureate to use a typewriter?" - could well get a new answer.
Late last month The New York Times boldly asked, in a banner headline, "Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town? With the publication of two new books, Gerald Murnane might finally find an American audience." The article, by Mark Binelli, was about Goroke-based writer Murnane, who still uses a Remington Monarch portable typewriter, as well as other manual models (yes, he is on Richard Polt's list of Writers and Their Typewriters). Goroke is a tiny town in the Wimmera region of western Victoria (population of 623), close to the South Australian border. It takes its name from the Aboriginal term for the Australian magpie.
Binelli quoted Murnane as saying, "In 1979 I taught myself to type using the index finger of my right hand alone. Since then, I have composed all my fiction and other writing using the finger just mentioned and one or another of my three manual typewriters." Binelli went on, "A strong case could be made for Murnane, who recently turned 79 [on February 25], as the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of. Even in his home country, he remains a cult figure; in 1999, when he won the Patrick White Award for under-recognised Australian writers, all his books were out of print. Yet his work has been praised by J.M. Coetzee and Shirley Hazzard, as well as young American writers like Ben Lerner and Joshua Cohen. Teju Cole has described Murnane as 'a genius' and a 'worthy heir to Beckett'. Last year, Ladbrokes placed his odds at winning the Nobel Prize for Literature at 50 to 1 — better than Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie and Elena Ferrante."
If Ladbrokes are on the money, as they most often are, the last Nobel Prize Laureate using a manual typewriter might well be Murnane. He's hardly likely, it seems, to switch to anything electronic or computerised at this late stage of his life. 
*Before Dylan, perhaps, Doris Lessing. But who was the first Nobel Prize-winning writer to use a typewriter, I wonder? Maurice Maeterlinck (1911)? Gerhart Hauptmann (1912)? Romain Rolland (1915)? Or George Bernard Shaw (1925)?
Maeterlinck
Hauptmann
Rolland with Mahatma Gandhi - whose typewriter is it?
George Bernard Shaw