She was refused service in stores and was sometimes followed by detectives in department stores who assumed she was a shoplifter. Mukherjee became a Canadian citizen but was unhappy living in that country because of the racial prejudice she encountered. The couple married in 1963, and from 1966 to 1980, they lived in Canada, first in Toronto and then Montreal, where they both held teaching positions. While studying at the Writers' Workshop, Mukherjee met the Canadian, Clark Blaise, who was also a student on the same program. in comparative literature, also from the University of Iowa, in 1970. She received a master of fine arts in 1963, and a Ph.D. Wanting to pursue a career as a writer and encouraged by her father to do so, Mukherjee then left India to attend the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Mukherjee received her bachelor of arts from the University of Calcutta in 1959, and a master of arts from the University of Baroda in 1961. She started her first novel when she was nine or ten, and at high school in Calcutta, she started writing short stories for school magazines. She learned to read and write at the age of three, and she later reported that as a child, the fictional worlds she discovered in stories were more real to her than the world around her. Her father co-owned a pharmaceutical factory and later became director of research and development of a large chemical complex.Įven as a child, Mukherjee knew she was going to be a writer. Author BiographyĪmerican novelist and short-story writer Bharati Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940, in Calcutta, West Bengal, India, to wealthy parents, Sudhir Lal and Bina Mukherjee. Carb in Massachusetts Review, he "took control and wrote his own story." "The Middleman," then, is the story of Alfie, a cynical man who "travels around the world, providing people with what they need-guns, narcotics, automobiles." It is a story of lust, betrayal, and murder, featuring American expatriates, a beautiful woman, and ruthless guerrillas. Alfie became such a strong presence in the writer's mind that, as she reported in an interview with Alison B. The novel featured a minor character named Alfie Judah, a Jew who had relocated from Baghdad to New York, via Bombay, India. The idea for the story came to Mukherjee when she was writing an incomplete novel about a Vietnam veteran who becomes a mercenary soldier in Afghanistan and Central America. Told by an Iraqi Jew who is a naturalized American citizen, it is set in an unnamed Central American country in the throes of a guerrilla insurgency. "The Middleman" is the title story in Bharati Mukherjee's collection, The Middleman and Other Stories (1988).
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