Harold Brodkey was a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. He was born in Alton, Illinois, in 1930. He graduated from Harvard University. Brodkey worked briefly as a page at NBC before a story he had shown to an editor at The New Yorker was published in 1953. His first short-story collection "First Love and Other Stories" was published in 1958. Brodkey was also a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker. He became legendary for a novel that he spent much of his adult life writing with parts being published in his 1988 short-story collection, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode before it was finally published as The Runaway Soul. In 1993, Brodkey announced to the readers of The New… Yorker that he had AIDS. He chronicled his illness in a diary that was published in The New Yorker. Harold Brodkey died on January 26, 1996.