Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson

Summary

A biography of the experimental British novelist B.S. Johnson, who killed himself in 1973 at forty years old, that deliberately adopts the fragmented, self-questioning formal strategies of its subject's own fiction. Coe weaves together interviews, letters, unpublished manuscripts, and his own commentary to argue that Johnson was a seriously undervalued innovator whose work deserves a permanent place in the literary canon. The book is both a rigorous critical reconsideration and an elegy, and it succeeded in reviving significant interest in Johnson's novels.