Atticus
by Ron Hansen

List Price: $13.00
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060927860
Publisher: HarperCollins

Ron Hansen was born eight minutes after his twin brother Rob on December 8, 1947. He was raised in Omaha, Nebraska, and educated in parochial schools, first by Dominican nuns at the Holy Angels grade school, followed by Jesuits at Creighton Preparatory school. He then attended Creighton University in Omaha, where he majored in English.

After graduating from college, Hansen served for two years during the Vietnam War as a Lieutenant in the Adjutant General's Corps at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where he was in charge of the casualty branch.

He entered the Iowa Writers Workshop on the GI Bill, where writers Alan Gurganus and T. Coraghessan Boyle were among his classmates. As soon as he got there, Hansen recalls, he immediately "fell in with" 30-year-old John Irving, who was his first workshop leader. The two men were soon close friends, and Hansen became a live-in babysitter for Irving's two sons. Hansen also studied with John Cheever.

After he received his M.F.A. in 1974, Hansen set out across Illinois as a college textbook salesman for Random House. At the same time he began writing his first historical western novel, Desperadoes. Having labored over two unpublished novels, Hansen reasoned that writing within a genre might increase his chances of publication. A fellowship at Stanford University enabled him to complete the novel, and Desperadoes was published in 1979. His second novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, appeared in 1983. There followed a third work that also dealt with the ninteenth and early twentieth-century West: Nebraska, a short story collection, which appeared in 1989.

When asked why he turned to history to write fiction, Hansen commented, "Isak Dinesen once said that she wrote into history because she owned the past, and I felt the same way--that if I did enough research I probably would know more than most people living and they couldn't contradict me much.... Also, I just found other people's stories more interesting. It engaged my imagination more to think about other people and try to imagine their lives rather than to re-create my own.

Yet, as Hansen also acknowledges, this early fiction is touched by autobiography. After hearing his grandfather, a Colorado rancher, tell of seeing Jesse James, Hansen developed a fascination with the Wild West that never left him. It is this grandfather who would become one of the models for the character of Atticus Cody in his novel Atticus. (The other model would be Atticus Finch, the honest and idealistic lawyer of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that Hansen loved as a child.)

By this time, Hansen had become an itinerant creative writing teacher, moving seventeen times to take jobs at colleges and universities across the country. He finally settled down in 1989 when he received a post at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The fact that one week after he started teaching California erupted in an earthquake seems slightly Hansen-esque--like something Hansen might have invented in a novel. Indeed, speaking of the kind of experience he seeks to capture in his fiction, Hansen has said, "You settle in and say, okay, this is what my life is going to be like, and something comes and slams you."

In 1991, Hansen's third novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, appeared. Chosen as one of the best books of the year by the The Nation, Mariette in Ecstasy was the sleeper hit of 1991, and was later made into a movie. The novel is set in 1906 inside a French convent in upstate New York, where the intensely pious Mariette Baptiste, a seventeen-year-old postulant, achieves an intimacy with Jesus so perfect that she develops the stigmata of Christ's crucifixion.

Hansen was inspired to write Mariette in Ecstasy after reading The Autobiography of St. Therese of Le Seur, about a French woman who entered a convent at an early age and had an intense relationship with God. Another source of inspiration was the impassioned 18th-century French novel, Letters from a Portuguese Nun, which Hansen encountered while editing the anthology of stories, You Don't Know What Love Is. Touching upon the relation of faith and love, which for Hansen had been a lifelong obsession, these works stirred his imagination, making him wonder, as he put it, why "nobody writes novels on subjects like that."

Pursuing his interests in spiritual thought, Hansen earned an M.A. in Spirituality from Santa Clara University, a Jesuit institution in California, and, in September 1995, became the University's Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor of Writing. The connection to the poet Hopkins is appropriate. As Hansen explains, he follows Hopkins in the belief in the 'inscape of things,' what Hopkins regarded as "the way God is reflected by all creation." This means, according to Hansen, that a "moral writer" is one who seeks simply "to show life as it is"--not necessarily one who has a religious view or writes about religious subjects. "Whether you're talking about drug dealers or the down and out, or whatever--as long as you're alert to what's going on, paying real attention to it, [you're doing] the job of the novelist."

Although there may seem an incommensurable distance between Jesse James and Mariette Baptiste, the novels are tied together by their author's concern with moral good and evil, with revenge and forgiveness. Many of the divergent threads of these earlier novels are woven into Atticus, where Hansen turns again to the life of an outlaw son of the West, this time giving to it the narrative and moral structure of the parable of the prodigal son.

More than his earlier works, Atticus is filtered through Hansen's self-perception. "Maybe Atticus [the father] represents what I hope to be and Scott is what I could be, unless there are all kinds of checks and balances.... I'm in some ways a lawless person myself. It doesn't appear that way. I'm really not comfortable with laws and strictures of society. I've always felt like an outsider in that way. But I know that acting it out and being a rebel will just get me into trouble and restrict my freedom. So I hew pretty closely to the line of what's allowed while letting it be known that that's a constraint."

Hansen has received many honors for his work, including a Guggenheim Foundation grant, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a three-year fellowship from the Lyndhurst Foundation. Most recently, Atticus was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction.

In addition to his story collection and novels and the anthology You Don't Know What Love Is, Hansen is co-editor, with Jim Shepard, of You've Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories that Held Them in Awe. He wrote the screenplays for Mariette in Ecstasy and, more recently, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

A practicing Catholic who attends noon Mass daily, Hansen now lives in California, where he writes and teaches at the University of Santa Clara.

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