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More about the Author
Edward Hower
Edward
Hower’s latest novel, Shadows and Elephants
was born out of his fascination with two historical
figures, the famous Russian-born mystic, Madame Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky, and her partner, the American Civil
War veteran, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, who was also
a well-known journalist in New York in the 1870’s.
But it wasn’t in New York where Hower first encountered
the illustrious pair, but in Madras, India, where he
was teaching on his second Fulbright grant in the early
1990s.
Right around the corner from where
he lived, he discovered by chance a 500-acre park which
was the international headquarters of the Theosophical
Society, an organization devoted to world peace and
spiritual understanding. In the grand main building,
among the palm and cashew trees, was an enormous marble
statue of a buxom woman in Victorian dress and a muscular,
full-bearded man who, according to Hower’s Indian
guide, was a fellow American. "It turned
out that these two had founded this arcane Society,
which I’d never heard of before. They were
my neighbors," the author says, "so
I had to find out what their story was."
For
the next several years Hower researched the extraordinary
history of the two explorers who founded the society
in America and took its message to India, Ceylon, and
eventually all over the globe. Their history—including
its many scandals and public trials—has been told
many times, but never as a novel. Once Hower started
fictionalizing it, the characters took off on their
own, and what resulted was a new story, based loosely
on the flamboyant adventures of Blavatsky and Olcott,
but with many added events and characters.
Hower says
it was "by chance" that he discovered the
inspirations for his novel’s characters, but it
may be that fate was merely extending the pattern of
his own life.
After graduating
from Cornell University, the author spent three years
teaching high school in East Africa. There he
also became a regular performer—singing Country-Western
songs with his guitar—on Voice of Kenya Television’s
"Sunday Star-Time" program. In his spare
time, he wrote his first novel, The New Life Hotel
(Avon/Bard), which The New York Times praised
as "A beautifully rendered story."
Back
in America, Hower served as a high-ranking but silent
spear-bearer for Cleopatra’s Egyptian army in 'Julio
Caesare' at the New York City Center Opera Company.
As history relates, his army lost, and the author,
licking his wounds, took a safer job as a counselor
in an upstate facility for juvenile delinquents.
This experience led to another novel, Wolf Tickets
(Viking), about which Pulitzer Prize winning novelist,
William Kennedy, said, "Edward Hower is a writer
of talent and substance."
The
author explored his own privileged but troubled childhood
in two novels, Night Train Blues and Queen
of the Silver Dollar (both from Permanent Press),
the latter set in an upscale mental hospital where torrid
romances augmented therapy sessions. He also acquired
a masters degree in Anthropology at UCLA and worked
as a therapist at the Hollywood Free Clinic.
Hower
first went to India on a Fulbright grant in 1986.
During his first year, he collected folktales in rural
villages near Jaipur, Rajasthan, and published the stories
in The Pomegranate Princess (Wayne State University
Press and Indian Illustrated Books). On subsequent
visits to India, he wrote articles for The New York
Times and Smithsonian. Over the years,
his fiction has appeared in literary journals such as
Transatlantic Review, Epoch and The Atlantic
Monthly; his reviews in the book pages of newspapers
such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe,
The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los
Angeles Times, New York Newsday, The New York
Times Book Review, The San Francisco Chronicle,
and The Miami Herald.
Edward Hower has lived
in Ithaca, New York, with his wife, the novelist Alison
Lurie, since 1975, and has two children by a previous
marriage. He has often left home with his wife to
travel and write while on fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation,
The New York State Council for the Arts, and the Fine
Arts Work Center of Provincetown, Massachusetts.
He has also taught Third World literature and English
at Duke, University of North Carolina, Ithaca College,
and Cornell, and given creative writing workshops in
Britain, Greece, Trinidad, Nepal, and Sri Lanka as well
as in several writers’ conferences and prisons
in the United States.
In Shadows
and Elephants, Edward Hower has created characters
that appeal to his own love of exploration and adventure.
The author is an engaging raconteur and is available
for print and broadcast interviews.
back to:
Shadows and Elephants
PUB DATE: January, 2002
CATEGORY: Fiction
PAGES:317
TRIM: 6 x 9
ISBN: 0-9679520-3-4
PRICE: $14.95 / Paperback Original
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