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Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker (April 18, 1947 [disputed] – November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, critic, performance artist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with complex themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality, language, identity, and rebellion. Her writing incorporates pastiche and the cut-up technique, involving cutting-up and scrambling passages and sentences; she also defined her writing as existing in the post-nouveau roman European tradition. In her texts, she combines biographical elements, power, sex and violence.
The only child of Donald and Claire (nee Weill) Lehman, Acker was born Karen Lehman in New York City in 1947, although the Library of Congress gives her birth year as 1948, while the editors of Encyclopædia Britannica gave her birth year as April 18, 1948, New York, New York, U.S. She died on November 30, 1997, in Tijuana, Mexico. Most obituaries, including The New York Times, cited her birth year as 1944.
Her family was from a wealthy, assimilated German-Jewish background that was culturally but not religiously Jewish. Her maternal grandmother, Florence Weill, was an Austrian Jew who had inherited a small fortune from her husband's glove-making business. Acker's grandparents went into political exile from Alsace-Lorraine prior to World War I, due to the rising nationalism of pre-Nazi Germany, moving to Paris and then to the United States. According to Acker, her grandparents were "first generation French-German Jews" whose ancestors originally hailed from the Pale of Settlement. In an interview with the magazine Tattoo Jew, Acker stated that religious Judaism "means nothing to me. I don't run away from it, it just means nothing to me" and elaborated that her parents were "high-German Jews" who held cultural prejudices against Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews. ("I was trained to run away from Polish Jews.")
Acker was raised in her mother and stepfather's home in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan's prosperous Upper East Side. Her father, Donald Lehman abandoned the family before Acker's birth. Her relationship with her domineering mother, even into adulthood, was fraught with hostility and anxiety because Acker felt unloved and unwanted. Her mother soon remarried, to Albert Alexander, whose surname Kathy, née Karen, was given, although the writer later described her mother's union with Alexander as a passionless marriage to an ineffectual man. Kathy had a half-sister, Wendy, by her mother's second marriage, but the two women were never close and long estranged. By the time of Acker's death, she had requested that her friends not contact Wendy, as some had suggested. In 1978, her mother Claire Alexander, committed suicide. As an adult, Acker tried to track down her father, but abandoned her search after she discovered that her father had disappeared after killing a trespasser on his yacht and spending six months in a psychiatric asylum until the state dismissed the murder charges.
Acker attended the Lenox School, a private school for girls on the Upper East Side. As an undergraduate at Brandeis University, she studied Classics and "took advantage of loosened mores, attending orgies thrown by theatre kids." In 1966, she married Robert Acker, and took his surname. Robert Acker was the son of lower-middle-class Polish-Jewish immigrants. Her mother and stepfather had hoped she would marry a wealthy man and did not expect the marriage to Acker to last long. She became interested in writing novels and, with Robert, moved to California to attend University of California, San Diego, where David Antin, Eleanor Antin, and Jerome Rothenberg were among her teachers. She received her bachelor's degree in 1968. After moving to New York, she attended two years of graduate school at the City College of New York in Classics, specializing in Greek. She did not earn a graduate degree. During her time in New York, she was employed as a file clerk, secretary, stripper, and porn performer.
Although her birth name was Karen, she was known as Kathy to her friends and family. Her first work appeared in print as part of the burgeoning New York City literary underground of the mid-1970s. During the 1970s, Acker often moved back and forth between San Diego, San Francisco, and New York, becoming a fixture of the downtown scene in the East Village. In February 1978, she married the composer and experimental musician Peter Gordon due to a cancer scare, and the pair ended their seven-year relationship shortly afterward. Later, she had relationships with the theorist, publisher, and critic Sylvère Lotringer and then with the filmmaker and film theorist Peter Wollen, as well as a brief affair with media theorist and scholar McKenzie Wark. In 1996, Acker left San Francisco and moved to London to live with the writer and music critic Charles Shaar Murray. She married twice. She was openly bisexual, and identified as queer.
In 1979, she won the Pushcart Prize for her short story "New York City in 1979." During the early 1980s, she lived in London, where she wrote several of her most critically acclaimed works. After returning to the United States in the late 1980s, she worked as an adjunct professor at the San Francisco Art Institute for about six years and as a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of Idaho, the University of California, San Diego (UC-San Diego), University of California, Santa Barbara (UC-Santa Barbara), the California Institute of Arts, and Roanoke College.
In July 1989, Acker was involved in a literary controversy when the trade periodical Publishers Weekly revealed that around four pages from Harold Robbins' novel The Pirate (1974) had been lifted without permission and integrated into Acker's novel The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec (1975), which had recently been re-published in the UK in a selection of early works by Acker titled Young Lust (1989). After Paul Gitlin saw the exposé in Publishers Weekly, he informed Robbins' UK publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, who requested that Acker's publisher Unwin Hyman withdraw and pulp Young Lust. Representatives for Acker explained that she was well known for her deliberate use of literary appropriation—or bricolage, a postmodern technique akin to plagiarism in which fragments of pre-existing works are combined along with original writings to create new literary works. After an intervention by William S. Burroughs—a novelist who used appropriation in his own works of the 1960s—Robbins issued a statement to give Acker retroactive permission to appropriate from his work, avoiding legal action on his publisher's part.
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Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker (April 18, 1947 [disputed] – November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, critic, performance artist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with complex themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality, language, identity, and rebellion. Her writing incorporates pastiche and the cut-up technique, involving cutting-up and scrambling passages and sentences; she also defined her writing as existing in the post-nouveau roman European tradition. In her texts, she combines biographical elements, power, sex and violence.
The only child of Donald and Claire (nee Weill) Lehman, Acker was born Karen Lehman in New York City in 1947, although the Library of Congress gives her birth year as 1948, while the editors of Encyclopædia Britannica gave her birth year as April 18, 1948, New York, New York, U.S. She died on November 30, 1997, in Tijuana, Mexico. Most obituaries, including The New York Times, cited her birth year as 1944.
Her family was from a wealthy, assimilated German-Jewish background that was culturally but not religiously Jewish. Her maternal grandmother, Florence Weill, was an Austrian Jew who had inherited a small fortune from her husband's glove-making business. Acker's grandparents went into political exile from Alsace-Lorraine prior to World War I, due to the rising nationalism of pre-Nazi Germany, moving to Paris and then to the United States. According to Acker, her grandparents were "first generation French-German Jews" whose ancestors originally hailed from the Pale of Settlement. In an interview with the magazine Tattoo Jew, Acker stated that religious Judaism "means nothing to me. I don't run away from it, it just means nothing to me" and elaborated that her parents were "high-German Jews" who held cultural prejudices against Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews. ("I was trained to run away from Polish Jews.")
Acker was raised in her mother and stepfather's home in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan's prosperous Upper East Side. Her father, Donald Lehman abandoned the family before Acker's birth. Her relationship with her domineering mother, even into adulthood, was fraught with hostility and anxiety because Acker felt unloved and unwanted. Her mother soon remarried, to Albert Alexander, whose surname Kathy, née Karen, was given, although the writer later described her mother's union with Alexander as a passionless marriage to an ineffectual man. Kathy had a half-sister, Wendy, by her mother's second marriage, but the two women were never close and long estranged. By the time of Acker's death, she had requested that her friends not contact Wendy, as some had suggested. In 1978, her mother Claire Alexander, committed suicide. As an adult, Acker tried to track down her father, but abandoned her search after she discovered that her father had disappeared after killing a trespasser on his yacht and spending six months in a psychiatric asylum until the state dismissed the murder charges.
Acker attended the Lenox School, a private school for girls on the Upper East Side. As an undergraduate at Brandeis University, she studied Classics and "took advantage of loosened mores, attending orgies thrown by theatre kids." In 1966, she married Robert Acker, and took his surname. Robert Acker was the son of lower-middle-class Polish-Jewish immigrants. Her mother and stepfather had hoped she would marry a wealthy man and did not expect the marriage to Acker to last long. She became interested in writing novels and, with Robert, moved to California to attend University of California, San Diego, where David Antin, Eleanor Antin, and Jerome Rothenberg were among her teachers. She received her bachelor's degree in 1968. After moving to New York, she attended two years of graduate school at the City College of New York in Classics, specializing in Greek. She did not earn a graduate degree. During her time in New York, she was employed as a file clerk, secretary, stripper, and porn performer.
Although her birth name was Karen, she was known as Kathy to her friends and family. Her first work appeared in print as part of the burgeoning New York City literary underground of the mid-1970s. During the 1970s, Acker often moved back and forth between San Diego, San Francisco, and New York, becoming a fixture of the downtown scene in the East Village. In February 1978, she married the composer and experimental musician Peter Gordon due to a cancer scare, and the pair ended their seven-year relationship shortly afterward. Later, she had relationships with the theorist, publisher, and critic Sylvère Lotringer and then with the filmmaker and film theorist Peter Wollen, as well as a brief affair with media theorist and scholar McKenzie Wark. In 1996, Acker left San Francisco and moved to London to live with the writer and music critic Charles Shaar Murray. She married twice. She was openly bisexual, and identified as queer.
In 1979, she won the Pushcart Prize for her short story "New York City in 1979." During the early 1980s, she lived in London, where she wrote several of her most critically acclaimed works. After returning to the United States in the late 1980s, she worked as an adjunct professor at the San Francisco Art Institute for about six years and as a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of Idaho, the University of California, San Diego (UC-San Diego), University of California, Santa Barbara (UC-Santa Barbara), the California Institute of Arts, and Roanoke College.
In July 1989, Acker was involved in a literary controversy when the trade periodical Publishers Weekly revealed that around four pages from Harold Robbins' novel The Pirate (1974) had been lifted without permission and integrated into Acker's novel The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec (1975), which had recently been re-published in the UK in a selection of early works by Acker titled Young Lust (1989). After Paul Gitlin saw the exposé in Publishers Weekly, he informed Robbins' UK publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, who requested that Acker's publisher Unwin Hyman withdraw and pulp Young Lust. Representatives for Acker explained that she was well known for her deliberate use of literary appropriation—or bricolage, a postmodern technique akin to plagiarism in which fragments of pre-existing works are combined along with original writings to create new literary works. After an intervention by William S. Burroughs—a novelist who used appropriation in his own works of the 1960s—Robbins issued a statement to give Acker retroactive permission to appropriate from his work, avoiding legal action on his publisher's part.
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