Evan Shelby Connell Jr. (August 17, 1924 – January 10, 2013) was an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist and author of epic historical works. He published under the name Evan S. Connell Jr (and sometimes simply Evan S. Connell).
In 2009, Connell was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement. On April 23, 2010, he won the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for "a living author with a substantial connection to the American West, whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition."
Background
Connell was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the only son of Evan S. Connell Sr. (1890–1974), a physician, and Ruth Elton Connell. He had a sister Barbara (Mrs. Matthew Zimmermann), to whom he dedicated his novel Mrs. Bridge (1959). Connell grew up in the upper middle-class Country Club District of Kansas City, Missouri, and graduated from Southwest High School in 1941.
Connell never married. For many years he maintained a close but typically long-distance relationship with singer Gale Zoe Garnett. He lived and worked in San Francisco and Sausalito, California, from 1954 to 1989, and then moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, when he remained until his death. Connell died on January 10, 2013, at an assisted-living facility in Santa Fe.
Connell was described as "...forever handsome. Lean and athletic", but quiet to the point of being mistaken for a mute at times. It is purported that he used his writing to engage with an intimacy he never found within his own life and certainly had never found as a child. Of his own life and habits Connell reportedly "always said he had the dullest life of any writer ever. There was nothing to discover or worry over."
Career
Connell's novels Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969) are bittersweet, gently satirical portraits of a conventional, unimaginative upper middle-class couple living in Kansas City from the 1920s to the 1940s. The couple tries to live up to societal expectations and to be good parents, but they are sadly incapable of bridging the emotional distance between themselves and their children and between each other.
Connell's 1960 novel The Patriot is the story of Melvin Isaacs, aged 17, and his experiences in naval aviation school during the Second World War. Melvin faces the terrifying reality of training and the likelihood of his "washing out" (failing). Melvin's attempts to communicate the realities of his experience to his father are rebuffed. Though not well reviewed, The Patriot contains some rewarding social satire and impressive scenes of aviation.
In 1966, Connell's novel "The Diary of a Rapist," became a "tour de force," though it garnered feminist criticism for portraying the typical rapist as a strange and unusual kind of man. Susan Brownmiller characterized Connell's protagonist, Earl Summerfield, as a "timid" man with a "wretched, deprived sex life, and an older, nagging, ambitious, 'castrating' wife." "Connell's Diary," she continues, "contains almost every myth and misconception about rape and rapists that is held in the popular mind."
While Connell eventually received widespread recognition as a noteworthy literary figure, his relative obscurity during his most active periods has been put down to the fact that he was "[un]willing to suffer the indignities of book tours, interviews, promotional appearances, and editorial expectations." Connell also refused any university teaching post that was offered to him "and thus never cultivated a devoted coterie of students who would go off into the writing world and carry his banner." Decades into his career Connell remarked "My own experience indicates that it is mostly a career of rejection and lost illusions."
Dorothy Parker described Connell as "a writer of fine style and amazing variety".
↑Lawrence M. Bensky, "Meet Evan Connell, Friend of Mr. and Mrs. Bridge", The New York Times, April 20, 1969; retrieved on June 8, 2009
123456Paul, Steve (2021). Literary alchemist: the writing life of Evan S. Connell. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. pp.preface. ISBN978-0-8262-7464-9.
↑Almond, Steve. "Lit Counts: We Are All Mrs. Bridge", Lighthouse Writers Workshop, 2018. lighthousewriters.org. Retrieved 19 August 2025. "Mrs. Bridge raises her three children. She teaches them manners, but cannot reach them emotionally. She suffers the neglect of her ambitious husband. She wages brief, doomed little wars against the conventions that imprison her... Connell is writing about the great human tragedy, which is... an inability to identify and experience our own truest feelings. India Bridge may serve as an exemplar of this crisis. But the book is devastating precisely because we are all Mrs. Bridge."
