Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark

Peter Pierce (Monash University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 9.1.1: Australian Writing and Culture.
Vol. editors: Susan Kossew (Monash University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1982

Places

Australia (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

In 1980, Thomas Keneally was in Los Angeles on a book tour to promote Confederates, his novel of the American Civil War, and in particular of the battle of Antietam. The clasp on his briefcase had broken, so that he called into a Beverly Hills luggage store to buy a new bag. When the proprietor – Leopold Pfefferberg – discovered (without much prompting) that Keneally was a writer, he delivered a precious and unexpected gift. “It’s a story for you, I swear”. The story, as Keneally related in his Author’s Note to his novel Schindler’s Ark (1982), was the improbable one of Oskar Schindler, “the German bon vivant, speculator, charmer and sign of contradiction, and of his salvage of a cross-section of a …

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2502 words

Citation: Pierce, Peter. "Schindler's Ark". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 January 2014 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=12147, accessed 25 November 2024.]

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