Speaking of urban legends, American literary light E.L. Doctorow (author of
Ragtime) has published a new novel based on the urban legend of the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, who were literally crushed to death by the books (and other paraphernalia) they collected in their Manhattan brownstone. From the
review this week in The New York Times:
The subject of E. L. Doctorow’s gentle, enveloping new novel, Homer & Langley, is one that might easily come to any deskbound writer who spends his days amid mounting piles of books, newspapers and magazines. It’s the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley — wealthy, reclusive Manhattan pack rats who lived for decades in squalor in a Fifth Avenue brownstone and died within a labyrinth of trash: towers of newspapers, battlements of books, mountains of boxes and heaps of chandeliers and debris (human organs in brine, pianos, a Model T Ford). After their deaths, in 1947, investigators had to break an upstairs window to gain entrance. Burrowing through walls of clutter, they soon found Homer’s body, but it took weeks to locate Langley’s, which lay within 10 feet of his brother’s, crushed beneath a booby trap he’d set for prowlers. After both Collyers were extracted, more than 100 tons of refuse was removed from the building.
Though their story is entirely true, the Collyers have become the stuff of urban legend; as such, they’ve inspired many commemorations before this one. A few years ago, Franz Lidz wrote a riveting, fact-filled nonfiction account of the brothers, Ghosty Men, interwoven with reminiscences of his uncle (also a compulsive hoarder). In 1954, the impetuous writer and critic Marcia Davenport (she titled her autobiography Too Strong for Fantasy) mined their biography for melodrama in her novel My Brother’s Keeper, in which a passionate opera singer drives two brothers to disposophobic lunacy. The peculiar pair have also popped up, by name or reputation, in plays, television shows and films, as well as in the horror and crime genre — from Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, in 1975, to Linda Fairstein’s “Lethal Legacy,” published last February.
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Speaking of urban legends, American literary light E.L. Doctorow (author of Ragtime) has published a new novel based on the urban legend of the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, who were literally crushed to death by the books (and other paraphernalia) they collected in their Manhattan brownstone. From the review this week in The New York Times:
That was VERY interesting! I've never heard that before!
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