Irvin Faust Obituary

Irvin Faust was faculty at Garden City High School in Garden City, NY. View the obituary, post a memory, or share a photo about Irvin Faust.

School Role	Faculty
Date of Passing	Jul 24, 2012
About	Irvin Faust, who as a high school guidance counselor found time to write novels and short stories that critics likened to the magic realist fiction of South America, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 88. The cause was pneumonia following a series of strokes, his wife, Jean, said. Even after Mr. Faust became a successful novelist, he continued to help Long Island high school students get into college, retiring in 1996. Beyond the pleasure he found in working with young adults, he thought the experience helped his writing. “I guess I belong to the European tradition of the writer who has to be involved with reality, rather than contemplating his navel and just being a confessional writer over and over and over again,” he said in an interview with Newsday in 1980. “I find that this doesn’t necessarily give me material that I use, but it keeps me in touch with what’s going on in the world.” Mr. Faust burst onto the literary scene in 1965 with a collection of short stories, “Roar Lion Roar and Other Stories.” Stanley Kauffmann said in The New Republic that opening the book was “like clicking on a switch: at once we hear the electric hum of talent.” Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Webster Schott said most of the stories “rise from Manhattan, isle of illusions, and all deal with the consequences of placing faith in fantasies.” The title story, which draws its name from the fight song of Columbia University, chronicles the tragedy of a Puerto Rican high school dropout who becomes a janitor at the university and strives to be part of the Ivy League world. After the Columbia Lions are beaten, and he prepares to commit suicide by leaping from a cliff above the Hudson, he says his last words, “Les Go Li-yons. We number one in the Ivory Leak.” Six years later, in a review of Mr. Faust’s novel “Willy Remembers” (1971) in The New York Times Book Review, the novelist R. V. Cassill called the “Lion” book “one of the best short-story collections of the 1960s.” But he said the new book, Mr. Faust’s third novel, was masterful, citing its “Joycean complexity of ambivalences, portmanteau images and concentric legends.” Photo Irvin Faust in 1967. Credit Jerry Bauer The novel’s story is told in the voice of the title character, one of the few remaining veterans of the Spanish-American War who mentally conflates past, present and imagined events. He remembers Dec. 7, 1941, when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, as the day his secretary had an abortion. His fogbound memory has Oswald shooting almost every American president who was ever assassinated. The crime novelist Elmore Leonard, in an introduction to the paperback edition of the book in 1983, wrote, “There is more sustained energy in the telling of what he remembered than in any novel I’ve ever read.” Mr. Faust mixed advertising jingles, legends, old songs and dances with precision and abandon. In a review of “Jim Dandy” (1994), a historical novel about Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in 1936, in The Times Book Review, Eddy L. Harris likened the way Mr. Faust slid around time periods to the imaginative confabulations of South American writers that came to be termed “magical realism.” Another novel, “The Steagle” (1966) got its name from the National Football League combining the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers into one team during World War II. It told of a professor who slips into a fantasy world during the Cuban missile crisis and travels the country seeking amorous adventures. Paul Sylbert directed a movie based on the book, “The Steagle,” in 1971. It starred Richard Benjamin, Chill Wills and Cloris Leachman. In all Mr. Faust wrote seven novels, two books of short stories and a number of uncollected short stories for various publications. His ill health reduced his writing in recent years, but he published a short story as recently as 2008. Irvin Faust was born in Brooklyn on June 11, 1924, and grew up in Queens. He served in the Army infantry during World War II in both the Pacific and European theaters and helped liberate Nazi concentration camps. He first pursued acting after the war, before enrolling in Teachers College of Columbia University on the G.I. Bill, where he earned two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. His Ph.D. dissertation was a case study of children’s lives. He received permission to write it in a literary format, and it was published in 1963 under the title “Entering Angel’s World: A Student-Centered Casebook.” That success prompted him to take a creative writing course, and he soon sold his first short story, “Into the Green Night.” He first taught in New York City schools, then became director of guidance and counseling at Garden City High School on Long Island. Before and after work, he wrote, said his wife, the former Jean Satterthwaite, his only immediate survivor. (Source: NY Times, 7/30/2012)