This undated file photo originally released by Viking Penguin shows author T.C. Boyle. (AP Photo/Viking Penguin, Milo Boyle)
(AP)
Richard Price and T. Coraghessan Boyle, authors, nonconformists and now inductees into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, remember the first time they even knew the country had an established cultural pantheon.
Price, whose novels include "Clockers" and "Lush Life," received an "Academy Award" for literature in 1999 and wondered if the "Academy" wasn't some kind of beach club or country club. "I thought maybe I get discounts at local restaurants. I had no idea," he joked during a recent interview.
Boyle, author of "Drop City," "World's End" and other fiction, was on a book tour in 1993 when he learned that he had won the academy's Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, given for "recent prose that merits recognition."
"I didn't know what it was all about, but my editor and agent thought it was important enough to pull me off the tour to go to the ceremony," Boyle said.
"I'll never forget it. John Updike, white-haired and beaming with his lovely wife. Kurt Vonnegut gave a fiery, denunciatory speech about something or the other. And I got to sit down next to Allen Ginsberg and exchange what was no doubt witty repartee. That was pretty heady for a young pup."
The academy is announcing Monday that nine artists have been voted in (openings occur when a member dies). Besides Price and Boyle, inductees include poets Jorie Graham and Yusef Komunyakaa, artist Judy Pfaff, architect Tod Williams and composers Stephen Hartke, Frederic Rzewski and Augusta Read Thomas.
Upon the official ceremony in May, they will enter a 250-member club that has included Henry Adams, Mark Twain and Mark Rothko, and currently features Edward Albee, Philip Glass and Toni Morrison. Artists are encouraged to serve on committees that award prizes, but there is no responsibility beyond agreeing to join.
Founded more than a century ago, and with a mission "to foster and sustain an interest in Literature, Music, and the Fine Arts," the academy was long a reclusive institution and remains — even among some artists — a bit like a distant god, known mostly at those moments when it chooses to show its face.
