Odd that his work was compared to John Kennedy Toole. Toole wrote a Book "A confederacy of Dunces", which became known almost as much for the fact that it was published 12 years after he died when his mothersent it to a publisher as for the fact that it was an odd but very well written book. He also offed himself at about the same age.
I haven't read this guy Egolf, but curiosity might well drive me to pick his first book up and read it.
LANCASTER, Pa. - Tristan Egolf, a political activist and author whose first novel at age 27 won him comparisons to William Faulkner and John Steinbeck, has died. He was 33.
Egolf died May 7 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a Lancaster apartment, said G. Gary Kirchner, Lancaster County coroner.
Egolf had shown signs of depression over the past 18 months, said Michael Hoober, a family therapist in Lancaster and friend of Egolf.
"He pushed the envelope wherever he went," Hoober said. "His creativity was always right in front of him, but somewhere in there it started to fall apart."
Egolf received literary acclaim after the 1998 publication of his first novel, "Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Corn Belt," a manic tale about a Kentucky farm boy. It was rejected by more than 70 U.S. publishers before being picked up by a French publisher while Egolf was working as a street musician in Paris' arts district.
A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement in London called the book "a work of substance, significance and originality ... it owes a discernible debt to Steinbeck and Faulkner, a more palpable one to John Kennedy Toole."
Egolf's second book, a frenetic love story called "Skirt and the Fiddle," was published in 2002, and a third novel, "Kornwolf," about a werewolf in Amish country, is slated for release next year.
According to his Web site, Egolf had been working on fine-tuning the screenplay for "Lord of the Barnyard" and had just finished a rock opera.
"It was very, very early for him ... and he had many, many more books coming," said Judy Hottensen, vice president of marketing and publicity for Grove/Atlantic, which published his first two novels in the United States.
Egolf was known in Pennsylvania as the leader of the Smoketown Six, a group of men arrested during a visit by
President Bush in July when they stripped down to thong underwear and formed a human pyramid to protest the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal.
Disorderly conduct charges against the men were eventually dropped. Egolf and several of the others filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in December, alleging their First Amendment rights were violated. The lawsuit will continue, said Mary Catherine Roper of the
American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
Egolf was also a musician and ran a multimedia arts Web site called Windmills that featured his music and writing.
