including a Guggenheim fellowship, the Grady-Stack Award for science writing, and an NEH “Public Scholar” grant. His book The Man Who Knew Infinity was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; it has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and was the basis for the film of the same name starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel. Kanigel and his wife, the poet S. B. Merrow, live in Baltimore.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Hearing Homer’s Song and reported the following:
Page 99 of my new book, Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry, is the second page of a chapter called “The Homeric Question,” about just how and where the Iliad and the Odyssey came to be:Visit Robert Kanigel's website.If there was a Homer who’d written, sung, gathered, dictated, or revised the epic poems, when and where did he live?The subject of my biography, Milman Parry, made these and related questions the subject of his life’s work. My book is a kind of literary detective story exploring how Parry came to his radical conclusion, which rocked the world of classical studies -- that no one “wrote” the Odyssey or the Iliad, at least in the way we mean it, but rather, that they were the product of an entirely different creative process – that they were composed orally by generations of singers. For this overturning of long accepted ideas, Parry has been called “The Darwin of Homeric Studies.”
If there was a historical siege of Troy, in which the Iliad was rooted and Odysseus’s return from which formed the basis for the Odyssey, when was it?
If there was something like an “original” Iliad and Odyssey, when and how had they come to be?
If they’d been written (as most readers of the epics had little cause to doubt) when and how were they first set down? And if not, how did they take the form known to us today?
Browsers of page 99 of the book would get an excellent idea of the intellectual subject of the book, but no idea of the dramatic human story behind it – no sense of Milman Parry’s emergence out of nowhere, in California, his early marriage, his personal and intellectual adventures at the Sorbonne in Paris, his visits to the former Yugoslavia, where he sought to confirm his theories among living epic singers, or his sudden and mysterious death by a gunshot wound, at age 33, in a Los Angeles hotel room.
It’s interesting to me that the page 99 material about the Homeric Question was what had drawn me to Parry from the outset. I am not a classical scholar but a writer by trade; I learned about the Homeric Question from a (real) character I had researched for one of my earlier books, On an Irish Island.
Funny how things work. Kismet, I think they call it.
--Marshal Zeringue
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