Controversial Novelist Dies Of Aids At 65

Harold Brodkey, a novelist, short-story writer and essayist known almost as much for his failure to publish as for the books he eventually did publish, died Friday at his home. He was 65.

The cause was AIDS, said his wife, Ellen Schwamm.

Brodkey, a writer of lush, lyric and serpentine prose, was a charismatic and stormy figure in literary circles. Critic Harold Bloom called him “an American Proust” and said he was “unparalleled in American prose fiction since the death of William Faulkner.”

But a mark of the division of opinion about Brodkey was a 1988 review in Kirkus Reviews, which called Brodkey’s short stories an “endless kvetch.”

In 1993, Brodkey announced in the pages of The New Yorker, in an article titled “To My Readers,” that he had AIDS as a result of homosexual relationships, which he said “took place largely in the 1960s.”

His announcement drew criticism because it implied that the AIDS virus had remained dormant far longer than medical experts think is possible.

He was best known for his novel “The Runaway Soul,” which he worked on for some 32 years. When the work was published in 1991, it received mixed reviews.