Alfred Chester
Alfred Chester was an American writer born on September 7, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish Romanian immigrant parents. Demonstrating early creativity and a passion for literature, Chester faced significant challenges, including the loss of all his hair due to scarlet fever at the age of seven, which contributed to his feelings of isolation. After earning a B.A. in English from New York University, he briefly pursued graduate studies at Columbia University before moving to France to join an expatriate community and cultivate his literary ambitions. Chester's first novel, *Jamie Is My Heart's Desire*, published in 1956, showcased his surreal and psychological style, although it did not achieve commercial success.
He gained recognition for his provocative short stories, winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957 and publishing in prestigious venues like *The New Yorker*. Despite his literary acclaim, Chester struggled with poverty and mental health issues, which worsened over time. His later works, including *Behold Goliath* and *The Exquisite Corpse*, delved into themes of identity and sexuality but received mixed reviews and poor sales. Chester's life ended in tragedy when he died from an accidental overdose in Jerusalem in 1971, leaving behind a complex legacy marked by both creative brilliance and personal turmoil.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Alfred Chester
Writer
- Born: September 7, 1928
- Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
- Died: August 1, 1971
Biography
Alfred Chester was born in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York, on September 7, 1928, the last of three children born to first-generation Jewish Romanian parents who operated a successful fur shop. Early on, Chester evidenced singular creativity and a passion for learning. Stricken at seven with scarlet fever, he was left permanently without hair anywhere on his body, a trauma that set him apart in self-conscious isolation. He received his B.A. in English from Washington Square College of New York University in 1949. He began graduate work at Columbia University but dropped out in 1950 and headed for France with literary aspirations.
With his charismatic personality and striking appearance, Chester quickly became part of a thriving American expatriate community. In 1956, he published his first novel, Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire, a surreal psychological study in which a hard-bitten undertaker falls under the spell of a beautiful deceased youth who may or may not be real. Sales were disappointing, but both in France and in America, Chester’s short stories were critically embraced for their provocative premises and their gothic ambiance, and they were included in annual best-of anthologies. On the strength of his short stories, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957, which marked him as a promising talent. This was confirmed when The New Yorker accepted one of his stories in 1959. The money from that sale enabled Chester to return to New York, where he became known not only for experimental short stories but also for his criticism, which appeared in the Partisan Review, Commentary, and The New York Review of Books. Chester found the reviews pilloried with unapologetic ruthlessness big-name writers to be artificial. Despite his celebrity, however, he lived in poverty. By 1963, Chester had abandoned New York and the distraction of constant review assignments. He headed for Morocco to return to fiction. His collection of short stories, Behold Goliath, a forthright treatment of his homosexuality, received harsh criticism for its perceived celebration of perverseness, and, not surprisingly, the volume had poor sales. Determined to produce an uncompromising work of defining import, Chester devoted himself to what would become The Exquisite Corpse, a tour de force in which characters search for stable identity in a baffling sequence of forty-nine brief chapters that, cumulatively, parodied linear plot and involved surreal touches of lyric homoeroticism. Like William Burroughs’s postmodern experiment Naked Lunch, the work became an underground classic but realized disappointing sales. By this time, Chester’s mental health had begun to deteriorate—he had been expelled from Morocco for belligerent behavior (he was paranoid and haunted by voices in his head that he tried to control with mixtures of alcohol and barbiturates). Chester disappeared into obscurity until his death in Jerusalem in 1971; his body was discovered on August 1, 1971; Chester appeared to have died from an accidental overdose.