Influential American poet, critic, and anthologist of contemporary gay male literature. Bergman has not hesitated to self-identify as gay, and in fact regularly publishes autobiographically inflected essays.

The Story: Readers and Writers of Fiction

Literature & Fiction

Bergman, David

United States

Pearson College Div

The Parent's Pharmacy: Preventing and Treating Childhood Illnesses

Discusses the general health care of children, recommends treatments for common childhood diseases, and outlines the effects and proper dosages of medicine for children

Pantell,Robert

Parenting & Relationships

Addison-Wesley

The members of the literary circle known as the Violet Quill―Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, Christopher Cox, Michael Grumley, Robert Ferro, and George Whitmore―collectively represent the aspirations and the achievement of gay writing during and after the gay liberation movement. David Bergman's social history shows how the works of these authors reflected, advanced, and criticized the values, principles, and prejudices of the culture of gay liberation. In spinning many of the most important stories gay men told of themselves in the short period between the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s, the Violet Quill exerted an enormous influence on gay culture. The death toll of the AIDS epidemic, including four of the Violet Quill's seven members, has made putting such recent events into a historical context all the more important and difficult. The work of the Violet Quill expresses the joy, suffering, grief, hope, activism, and caregiving of their generation. The Violet Hour meets the urgent need for a history of the men who bore witness not only to the birth but also to the decimation of a culture.

The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture (Between Men-Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies)

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

The members of the literary circle known as the Violet Quill―Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White, Christopher Cox, Michael Grumley, Robert Ferro, and George Whitmore―collectively represent the aspirations and the achievement of gay writing during and after the gay liberation movement. David Bergman's social history shows how the works of these authors reflected, advanced, and criticized the values, principles, and prejudices of the culture of gay liberation. In spinning many of the most important stories gay men told of themselves in the short period between the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s, the Violet Quill exerted an enormous influence on gay culture. The death toll of the AIDS epidemic, including four of the Violet Quill's seven members, has made putting such recent events into a historical context all the more important and difficult. The work of the Violet Quill expresses the joy, suffering, grief, hope, activism, and caregiving of their generation. The Violet Hour meets the urgent need for a history of the men who bore witness not only to the birth but also to the decimation of a culture.

Not until recently has gay American literature become a "genre" in its own right, nor has there been a full-length critical survey of it in its entire range - fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry. "Gaiety Transfigured" makes distinguished contributions on both these fronts, helping to identify and define the corpus of gay writing in America and bringing to it its first theoretically-informed critical appreciation. David Bergman opens with two chapters that define the experience of being homosexual - the feelings of otherness and ostracism on the one hand, but of equality and erotic authenticity on the other. These chapters provide a sensitive and insightful passage into the exploration (and "transfiguration") of those feelings by such famous American writers as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, and F. O. Matthiessen, "and" by forgotten or unknown names like Francis Grierson and Tobias Scheebaum. But Bergman is not content to confine himself merely to the literary high ground, and he yanks the reader back to the grim contemporary of AIDS in a chapter on Larry Kramer. By looking at the entire range of literary activity, "Gaiety Transfigured" shows how these individual gay men imagined a new place for themselves in American culture, and how they negotiated the chasm between themselves and the rest of society. This "new" place, Bergman argues, is often based on a fertile (sometimes fanciful) reconstruction of their prehistoric and pagan past: black gay writers returning, for instance, to a precolonial image of Africa (Alain Locke, Countee Cullen), some whites to a classical Greek pattern (John Addington Symonds, Havelock Ellis, Edwawrd Carpenter), and others still to native American models (Francis Grierson and David Plante). Self-representation (with emphasis of the "self"), Bergman concludes, is both the journey and the destination of these artists: "By such transformations, gay writers are proving to themselves and to the culture around them that they will no longer passively accept the dominant culture's representations, but actively develop their own."

Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature (Wisconsin Project on American Writers)

Self-Help

Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Bergman analyzes the writings of such famous American writers as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin,  F. O. Matthiessen, and  Larry Kramer.  He considers the entire range of literature, including poetry and drama, and gives attention to African or Native American themes in the work of Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Francis Grierson, David Plante and others.

University of Wisconsin Press

Instructor's Manual for the Heath Guide to Literature

de Roche, Joseph

Epstien, Daniel Mark

World Literature

D.C. Health and Co.

The Health Guide to Literature

EPSTEIN, Daniel Mark

Literary

D.C. Heath & Co.

The Heath Guide to Literature

The Turtle and the Two Ducks: Animal Fables Retold from LA Fontaine

LA FONTAINE, JEAN DE

Plante, Patricia

Children's Books

Ty Crowell Co.

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Books by Bergman, David