My father's story.My family and I were pleased to read Neil Coughlan's well-written review of The Witness of St. Ansgar's ("Manhattan Transfer Manhattan Transfer novel portraying the teeming greed of the city’s inhabitants. [Am. Lit.: Manhattan Transfer] See : Decadence ," May 19), the recently published novel by my late father, Francis W. Nielsen. To answer the questions posed at the end of Mr. Coughlan's review: the two novels that my father published under the name Frank Michael Cortina cor`ti´na n. 1. (Biology) a cobwebby remnant of the partial veil which in some mature mushrooms hang from the edges of the cap. Noun 1. in the early 1970s were titled Stroke a Slain Warrior and Face to Face. They were composite portraits of men and women my father worked with as a drug counselor. Because of the confidential nature of the material, he chose to write under a pseudonym pseudonym (s  `dənĭm) [Gr.,=false name], name assumed, particularly by writers, to conceal identity. A writer's pseudonym is also referred to as a nom de plume (pen name). . The works, originally published by Columbia University Press Columbia University Press is an academic press based in New York City and affiliated with Columbia University. It is currently directed by James D. Jordan (2004-present) and publishes titles in the humanities and sciences, including the fields of literary and cultural studies, but now out of print, may be found at several online used-book outlets. When my father died in 1990 he left a number of unpublished manuscripts. Although I vowed at the time to get some of them published, after thirteen years his manuscripts still sat in boxes. Through the efforts of my oldest two daughters, my mother and me, the manuscript of The Witness (as it was then known) was retyped into our computer and edited. We were prepared to self-publish it, but we decided to send it first to Steerforth Press in nearby Hanover, New Hampshire Hanover is a town located on the Connecticut River in Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 10,850 at the 2000 census. It is best known as the home of Dartmouth College. . Editors there were very enthusiastic about the book and released it in less than a year. The Witness of St. Ansgar's was begun sometime in the late 1970s, though exactly when is unclear. It was one of a number of novels my father worked on during that decade. He rewrote Witness several times, finishing it in 1985. Over the next few years, he and my mother made several attempts to publish it, but were unsuccessful. When my father died, all his manuscripts were left in good order, typed and in labeled boxes. The Witness of St. Ansgar's needed relatively little editing. My father was able "to send his imagination so impressively backward," in Mr. Coughlan's words, because he was a fine novelist and because the world of Stanley Street Stanley Street may refer to:
ERIK NIELSEN Erik Hersholt Nielsen, DFC, QC, PC (born February 24 1924) is a former Canadian politician, and longtime Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament for Yukon. Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, he was Minister of Public Works in the short-lived government of Prime Minister Joe Brookfield, Vt. |
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