David Rhodes Death, Obituary – David Rhodes. Ben Barnhart, a younger editor who worked for our company, had been reading John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction at the beginning of that year. While he was doing so, he came across a passage that praised David’s first three books, which were all published to significant acclaim in the seventies. It was John Gardner who first recognized David as a “brilliant visionary,” and in the mysterious way that letters work, his praise led Ben to read these novels, where he discovered an acknowledgement in one of them of David’s agent, Lois Wallace, and then to reach out to David directly, where he learned that he had written several subsequent novels, but simply lost interest in publishing.
Ben was given access to one of these manuscripts by David, and before long, we were working with him to produce and publish Driftless, as well as to reissue his previous three books, which were titled The Last Fair Deal Going Down, The Easter House, and Rock Island Line. The people in the novel Driftless, which takes its name from the part of southwestern Wisconsin where it is located and serves as its setting, are just as unrefined as the environment in which they dwell. David’s characters are bright and profound, idiosyncratic and spiritual, and driven by wants that are as baffling as they are demanding, despite the fact that they often appear to be ordinary on the surface and nearly always go off the usual road.
It was exciting to be a part of an American master novelist’s comeback to a healthy readership, which coincided with the publication of Driftless in 2008, which caused the book to become a national phenomenon. The next year, 2014, saw the release of Jewelweed, which served as a sequel of sorts to Driftless. David’s fifth novel, Rich with His Signature Sense of Empathy and Wonder, Enlarged His Vast Vision David’s fifth novel, Rich with His Signature Sense of Empathy and Wonder, expanded David’s vast vision, in which the seemingly everyday becomes magical, even legendary. And then not long after Jewelweed had been published.
David approached me with an idea and a plan to build the novel that would become Painting Beyond Walls, which is his sixth novel, and which we released this autumn. Painting Beyond Walls was a collaborative effort between David and myself. Painting Beyond Walls, which is David’s book that takes place in the not-too-distant future and engages on present biology, philosophy, and history in ways that are both unsophisticated and complex, is possibly David’s most ambitious work of fiction.