Дон Джордж Берри: Орегондық жазушының өмірі мен шығармалары

American novelist

Don George Berry (January 23, 1932 – February 20, 2001) was an American author and artist best known for his trilogy of historical novels about early settlers in the Oregon Country. Described as one of "Oregon's best fiction writers of the post World War II generation", and a "Forgotten Beat", Berry's second novel, Moontrap (1962), was nominated for the National Book Award in 1963.

Berry was born in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, Berry moved to Oregon with his mother when he was still in his teens, living in the Vanport housing project and attending Roosevelt High School, where he was elected student body president. After winning a scholarship in mathematics, Berry enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, which he attended from 1949 to 1951, taking classes with the noted calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds and historian Dorothy Johansen. To support himself during this time, worked in the university bookstore and slept in the boiler room, which he had been hired to tend. Together with Snyder, Welch, and Whalen, who would later informally come to be known as the West Coast Beats, Berry formed the Adelaide Crapsey Oswald Spengler Mutual Admiration Poetasters Society, devoted to "[drinking] wine, [writing] poetry, and goof[ing] off". During this period, Berry also met his future wife, the artist and author Kajira Wyn Berry.

In 1956, after 144 rejection letters, Berry sold his first science fiction story, "Routine for a Hornet", which was published in the December issue of If magazine. Over the next two years, Berry published 9 more science fiction stories in various magazines, abandoning the genre with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957, which he claimed marked the "death of science fiction." More recently however, the spiritual themes of the book have been subject to a critical reappraisal, with Therése Jörgne completing a phenomenological study of the novel in 2012. Trask was published in hardcover by the New York based publishing house Viking Books in 1960, and in paperback later the same year by Ballantine, later being re issued by Comstock Editions. Although some paperback editions of the novel were retitled Trask: the coast of Oregon, 1848, the 2004 re issue of the book by Oregon State University Press was published under Berry's original title. Berry followed up on the success of Trask with A Majority of Scoundrels (Harper and Brother, 1961), which provides an "informal history" of the fur trade in the Rocky Mountains through the story of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. Berry's second historical novel set in the Oregon Country, Moontrap (1962), was perhaps his best known in his lifetime, having been nominated for the National Book Award in 1963. Moontrap depicts the difficult transition from fur trapping to farming, as experienced by a group of fur trappers and their Native American wives facing off against civic minded entrepreneurs and the end of frontier justice. According to his wife, Berry later completed a sequel to Trask, which he burned. Although the site is no longer maintained, this large body of literature, which includes a memoir and an unfinished fantasy novel set in Minoan Crete has been preserved thanks to the Internet Archive.

Following Berry and Wyn's marriage in 1957, Berry became a step father to three children from a previous marriage. David, Bonny and Duncan (oldest to youngest) are the names of his step children. In the mid 1960s, the family moved to the Oregon coast, where they spent several years living off the land in a rustic cabin. After a period of touring the Caribbean on a 55 foot ketch, the family moved to Vashon Island in 1974, living on a boat before moving into a home in the inner harbor. Berry and Wyn separated in 1987, and Berry returned to living on boat in 1995, an experience which he describes in his nonfiction memoir, Magic Harbor (1995 2001). Besides writing, Berry's lifelong artistic pursuits included bronze sculpture, sumi e painting, and blues guitar playing. He died in Seattle in 2001.