Show Daily: Interview with Harry Mark Petrakis
Still Going Strong
by Joseph Barbato -- Publishers Weekly, 6/11/2004
Since 1957, when his first story, “Pericles on 31st Street,” appeared in
the
Atlantic Monthly, Harry Mark Petrakis has worked the rich fictional
territory of Greek-American life in Chicago. Now, at 80, he has delivered his
10th novel, The Orchards of Ithaca (Southern Illinois Univ. Press)—and
has plans for more.
“I still feel vigorous,” says Petrakis, who grew up
the son of a Greek Orthodox priest in Chicago and now lives across the lake in
the Indiana dunes with Diana, his wife of nearly 60 years. “The ambition is
blunted, the resources of energy are not as plentiful, but I am a craftsman, and
I am still at my work.” He still lectures, too—the source of much of his income
in lean years, he says.
His new novel tells the tale of Orestes Panos, a
successful Chicago restaurateur who is turning 50, with a large family and all
the attendant problems, just as the country enters a new millennium. Says
Petrakis: “It’s about an ordinary man who comes through a period of crisis and
struggles to find a way to live in the future. It’s another page in the book of
my life.”
Twice nominated for the National Book Award in fiction,
Petrakis is best known for his 1966 bestseller, A Dream of Kings, which
became a movie starring Anthony Quinn. Last year, Southern Illinois published
his Twilight of the Ice, a novel about a crew of railroad car icemen
facing obsolescence with the advent of modern refrigeration. Set in the Chicago
rail yards of the 1950s, the book celebrates the lives of immigrants and
workingmen and is dedicated to the late film director Sam Peckinpah, who
encouraged Petrakis to write it.
Petrakis has three sons—“all
freelancers”—and several grandchildren. In all, he has published 18 books. “I
have been grateful for my life’s journey,” he says. “I’ve blundered and made
mistakes. I married young and well, and I’ve lasted to 80. And I am still doing
what I love—telling stories. What I fear more than dying is a depletion of the
power to continue doing what I have for so long.”
Later this month, he
travels to Greece to research a second novel in a trilogy about the Greek war of
independence that began with The Hour of the Bell in 1976. Petrakis
autographs today, table 8, 9:30– 10:30 a.m.
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