![]() My admiration only increased in the ensuing years." Mailer writes that his prose was "at once elegant, ironic, and never without feeling for his moral values." Trillin wrote of their years at Time, "we were awestruck by his graceful prose and dazzling insights. No mutual back-scratching here they loved the guy and his work. Barry Farrell's admiring contemporaries are such major-leaguers as Norman Mailer, Calvin Trillin, Josh Greenberg and John McPhee. Lee Bailey's botched defense of Patty Hearst and about Frank Sinatra at his most thuggish.īook-jacket blurbs are always suspect, but not these. The book also is about Billy Graham, Hollywood celebrities, sports, music, politics, social upheaval, poetry, laughter it is about F. There is nostalgia, too, in this collection, because Barry wrote the big stories of his generation: the kidnapping and trial of Patty Hearst the Gary Gilmore execution the Hillside Strangler.īut this isn't merely a gathering of crime stories. This collection is like one of those expansive, table-laden, multicourse Sunday brunches put on by good restaurants. Now there is a new Farrell book, "How I Got to Be This Hip," put together by Steve Hawk, one of Barry's writing students at the University of California at Santa Barbara. By the time he died at age 49 in 1984, his legend was secure. He wrote countless cover stories and essays for both Time and Life. So his career took off, first with Time magazine, then with Life, with books and in a dozen other publications. A rare species he was, in his teens, when his contemporaries cluttered their speech with "ya know" and "I mean."īarry loved the poetry he found in words and thus his choice of words sparkled in his writing. ![]() ![]() But the half-innocent mischievousness of young Farrell's remark delighted the Hearst editor.Įttelson became a Farrell admirer as so many others would be.Įven as a kid, Barry had this rich, deep voice that delivered coiling, precise English sentences. Noting Ettelson deep in thought, the kid asked, "Making big decisions?" Any other editor and Barry would have been out on the sidewalk. One of the first Farrell stories I heard was the time when Barry, the new copy boy, delivered some papers to then-Executive Editor Lee Ettelson. The first time I became aware of Barry Farrell, he was a gangly copy boy at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, fresh out of Queen Anne High School, and even then he was beginning his legend. ![]()
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