He came to Iowa with an MA from the Johns Hopkins’ writing program. Just in his late twenties, he already had been an officer in the South Korean Army during the Korean War, a general’s aide, and eventually one of the two Koreans to serve on the UN Truce Team. Before I actually saw him in person, I had heard much about him and viewed his photograph-stern-faced and seemingly foreboding. He was my officemate in a converted army barrack that housed the freshman writing graduate assistants.
I met Kim in Iowa City fifty-five years ago, in 1960. It was rare then as it is now for a new writer to take up pages in a magazine with a circulation of more than eight million. Life magazine, one of this country’s most successful weeklies in the mid 1960s, published a photo feature called “Best-Selling Korean” with Kim his wife, Penny, on a backyard swing and their two children, David and Melissa, sitting on their father’s lap. This he has done with a skill so great it is almost invisible. his purpose here is not to tell the deeds of war but to probe the involutions and ambiguities of conscience-the meaning of suffering and of evil and holiness, the uncertain boundaries between illusion and truth.
Louis Post Dispatch and was followed by many more, including Chad Walsh’s front-page review in The New York Times Book Review of February 16, 1964, in which he said: The rush began with a laudatory full-page review in the St. The publisher, George Braziller, normally an outlet for art books and some important poets, never before had experienced a bestseller, scrambling to outsource printing as U.S. No one expected the novel to take off the way it did. I was struck-and he was amused-by the German translation with an analytical pamphlet wrapped to the book with cellophane. When I visited Kim (that’s how we addressed him never Richard) at his home in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, in 1968, he showed me a three-tier, glass-front bookcase filled with editions in many languages. After all, how many Korean writers have ever enjoyed such international recognition and prominence? But still, not even to know of Kim’s existence. Kim had never been discussed at the Asian American reading group, he had never appeared on the syllabus.” Even after an older Korean man gave her a copy, the novel sat unopened on her bookshelves for another decade.įame is fleeting, and obscurity looms. Choi, daughter of a Korean father, notes in her foreword to the 2011 Penguin Classics republication of The Martyred that “Richard K. I was there at the beginning, while it was being written, then a witness to the phenomenal success of the novel throughout the world. The man and his book have had an ongoing presence in my memories for decades. Kim or his 1964 novel, The Martyred, I was dumbstruck.
When I read that the novelist Susan Choi, in her quest for her Korean literary roots, had never heard of Richard E.
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