Snow and Straw — Tracy Daugherty

Fictionalized accounts of John Howard Griffin, Jack Elliott Myers, and Anna Akhmatova, portraying the struggles and sacrifices of the writing life.Tracy Daugherty is an acclaimed biographer of authors, as well as a distinguished fiction author in his own right. In SNOW AND STRAW he braids together these two skills, presenting three novellas that offer fictionalized accounts of the lives of very disparate writers: John Howard Griffin, Jack Elliott Myers, and Anna Akhmatova. What connects their stories--aside from Daugherty's mastery of language and narrative--is the insight they offer into the writing life. All three of his subjects, along with a wide cast of other characters real and imagined who populate their stories (including, in the Griffin account, a vivid portrait of Thomas Merton), are human, all too human, and Daugherty grants them their flaws along with their achievements--suggesting, in the process, that it may not be possible to separate the two. He also demonstrates, compelling, that sometimes it is fiction that conveys the greatest truths.Fiction.