Four years ago Don De Grazia was working as a bouncer at Metro and living at the YMCA while teaching in Columbia College’s fiction writing department. In typical impoverished-writer fashion, he spent his last $75 to send his unagented, unsolicited novel about a young man who gets involved with skinheads in Chicago, American Skin, to the English publisher Jonathan Cape.
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In part due to the trend of emerging working-class voices–but also perhaps because the racial violence depicted in the novel happens on foreign soil–Jonathan Cape was willing to take a chance on De Grazia, and American Skin was published in the UK in 1998. Not long after that, De Grazia’s new agent approached publishers in New York armed with a sheaf of positive reviews. The novel proved to be much more popular the second time around, and Scribner is releasing it this week.
American Skin’s success story hasn’t exactly been a struggling writer’s dream. The same year the novel was published in England, New Line Cinema released American History X, a film with elements that De Grazia found a little too close to American Skin’s for comfort. Besides the subject matter and the titles, the book and the movie share plotlines that appear remarkably coincidental–most notably a prison story line allegedly added to the script after star Edward Norton’s well-publicized “researching” of skinhead source material, including, some have speculated, De Grazia’s novel. Norton told New City not long after the movie’s release that he wanted his character to be “the king of the skinheads”; in American Skin the protagonist, Alex Verdi, and a murderous Nazi skin, Frank Pritzger, repeatedly refer to an antiracist skinhead character as “the King of the Skinheads.”
De Grazia, who now teaches full-time at Columbia and is the editor of the 33-year-old literary journal F Magazine, is at work on his next novel. But he’s reluctant to discuss what it’s about. “I’ve developed this strange phobia about that,” he demurs.
