I took off my sweatshirt and dropped it on the grass and set off around the track. As soon as I started running, the world changed. The bodies spread out across the green of the football field were parts of a scene remembered, not one real at this moment. The secret of effort is to keep on, I told myself. Not for the world would I have stopped then, and yet nothing- not even if I had been turned handsome as a reward for finishing- could have made up for the curious pain of the effort.

Literary career
Brodkey's career began promisingly with the short story collection First Love and Other Sorrows which received widespread critical praise at the time of its 1958 publication. " In The New Criterion Bruce Bawer found the book's tone to be "extraordinarily arrogant and self-obsessed. Life
Brodkey was raised in University City Missouri outside St.

Harold Brodkey born Aaron Roy Weintraub (October 25 1930 born in Staunton Illinois – January 26 1996 Manhattan) was an American writer and novelist.