Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of one of the few contemporary novelists to sell a lot of books to young men, Chuck Palahniuk, (books by this author) born in Burbank Washington (1962). He comes from a family with a violent background. His grandfather murdered his grandmother when his father was little. Palahniuk's parents had a rocky marriage and he often had to turn up the TV at night to drown out the sound of fighting.
He wanted to be a writer in college, but his writing professors didn't like him. One tried to get him to drop the class, and another told Palahniuk that he'd never have an original thought. So Palahniuk started pouring his energy into living on the edge. He would go out to bars at night and take on an alternate identity, calling himself Nick. And he would use that identity to act out all of his aggression, getting into bar fights and other semi-legal activity.
He got a job as a diesel mechanic at Freightliner Trucks, which paid well but made him miserable. He became addicted to drugs and alcohol. And then he moved to a house near a hill that somehow blocked his TV's reception. At first he was miserable without television, but it inspired him to start reading on a regular basis for the first time since he was a teenager. He discovered the work of contemporary fiction writers like Amy Hempel and Denis Johnson, and they inspired him to start writing fiction of his own.
The first novel Palahniuk tried to publish was turned down by a series of publishers because it was too violent and bleak. Palahniuk decided he had a choice. He said, "I could either write something that's less dark and upsetting or I could write something that's ten times as dark and upsetting."
The result was his novel Fight Club (1996), about a cult leader named Tyler Durden, who encourages his followers to get together at night and fistfight each other as a way of escaping their meaningless lives. Fight Club didn't get much publicity when it came out, but it started selling by word of mouth among young men in high school and colleges across the country. It was made into a movie in 1999.