Robert Lowry.

Lowry, Robert; Novelists; Find Me in Fire (Book); Fiction writing; Aldridge, John; Creative writing; Fiction

This article focuses on novelist Robert Lowry. He experienced his career suicide as a novelist. He had all the trophies of what a professional author did after 1945, writing at least one of each of the period's war novels, veteran's-return novels, race novels, or New York novels. Lowry by 1951 was one of the neo-Hemingways in John Aldridge's "After the Lost Generation," dispraised for their thick-laid negation and lack of technical innovation. Despite Lowry's lifelong chronic need for income, with his doubleday advance for the book "Find Me in Fire," and forthcoming work, he had a modicum of income and independence in 1948. The two novels and four short-story collections that Lowry published between 1954 and 1962 form an uneven coda, one that is stylistically unsettled in ways that are good, as though he were succeeding in going back to his prewar, pre-Doubleday freedom, before the novel-writing pushed against the ceiling of his talents and, perhaps, sidetracked the kind of storytelling in which he excelled. INSET: A Robert Lowry Checklist.