Posted on 05/14/2005 6:11:06 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
LANCASTER, Pa. - Tristan Egolf, a political activist and author whose first novel at age 27 won him comparisons to William Faulkner and John Steinbeck, has died. He was 33.
Egolf died May 7 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a Lancaster apartment, said G. Gary Kirchner, Lancaster County coroner.
Egolf had shown signs of depression over the past 18 months, said Michael Hoober, a family therapist in Lancaster and friend of Egolf.
"He pushed the envelope wherever he went," Hoober said. "His creativity was always right in front of him, but somewhere in there it started to fall apart."
Egolf received literary acclaim after the 1998 publication of his first novel, "Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Corn Belt," a manic tale about a Kentucky farm boy. It was rejected by more than 70 U.S. publishers before being picked up by a French publisher while Egolf was working as a street musician in Paris' arts district.
A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement in London called the book "a work of substance, significance and originality ... it owes a discernible debt to Steinbeck and Faulkner, a more palpable one to John Kennedy Toole."
Egolf's second book, a frenetic love story called "Skirt and the Fiddle," was published in 2002, and a third novel, "Kornwolf," about a werewolf in Amish country, is slated for release next year.
According to his Web site, Egolf had been working on fine-tuning the screenplay for "Lord of the Barnyard" and had just finished a rock opera.
"It was very, very early for him ... and he had many, many more books coming," said Judy Hottensen, vice president of marketing and publicity for Grove/Atlantic, which published his first two novels in the United States.
Egolf was known in Pennsylvania as the leader of the Smoketown Six, a group of men arrested during a visit by President Bush in July when they stripped down to thong underwear and formed a human pyramid to protest the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal.
Disorderly conduct charges against the men were eventually dropped. Egolf and several of the others filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in December, alleging their First Amendment rights were violated. The lawsuit will continue, said Mary Catherine Roper of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
Egolf was also a musician and ran a multimedia arts Web site called Windmills that featured his music and writing.
I live near this area and never heard of him.
sounds like he spent a lot of time in FRance. ;-)
He'll be missed - by a small and deeply disturbed group of lefties.
Bush's fault
Sad story.
The smoketown leader smoked himself. A lot of lib erals have depression. Its a hazard of the cult.
Sequel to Barnyard Follies?
I can certainly understand how such a leftwing extremist wuld be deeply depressed by recent more-centrist progress.
Sounds like he should have veered right instead of left at the intersection!
People should wear panties on their heads in his honor at the funeral.
Egolf was nuts.
Good riddance. The world will be just that much better off without him. If we are very lucky, anyone else whom ever felt the need to strip down to thong underwear in protest of Abu Ghraib will follow this guys lead. Idiots.
Longbow
Good riddance.
What a terrible loss.
So why am I here?
So why am I here?
That is the question of the ages. ;-)
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