THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 9, 1995 TAG: 9510090057
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
In what amounts to a one-man literary festival, Louis Rubin Jr. will autograph Tuesday from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. his splendid new novel ``The Heat of the Sun'' at Prince Books on Main Street in Norfolk.
He will also sign another new work, ``A Writer's Companion,'' described by columnist Jack Kilpatrick as ``the Swiss army knife of reference works,'' a 1,300-page tome of facts touching on almost anything you can think of. Compiling it, Rubin polled 50 authors.
Prince also will display a dozen of Rubin's paintings in acrylics of ships and boats that have caught his eye on our waterfronts.
In a joyous career, which shows no sign of ebbing, Rubin has written or edited 45 books. He has been teacher, critic, poet, journalist, biographer, historian, publisher and a lousy left-handed first baseman at the University of Richmond.
He is a prodigious creator; yet the time he pours into his own writing is but a fraction of that which he lavishes on the works of others.
After graduation from Richmond, he earned a doctorate and taught at Johns Hopkins University.
He worked with newspapers in New Jersey, Staunton and Baltimore, and as The Richmond News Leader's associate editor.
In 10 years at Hollins College he nurtured as chairman of the English department a top-flight creative writing program.
Last year a donor funded fellowships to bring gifted undergraduates from other colleges to Hollins for a semester as Rubin Writers.
``Louis is one of three or four decisive persons who have had a positive impact on Hollins,'' Hollins historian John Wheeler said Saturday.
``He's sort of our patron saint,'' said a young woman in publicity.
In 1967, he joined the University of North Carolina. In 1981, on a panel of scholars in New York, he lamented the trouble of writers in finding anybody to consider their work in an era of conglomerates whose eyes fuse to the bottom line.
Riding home on the train, he brooded over the impossible odds his students faced. ``Why not start a little publishing house?'' he thought. And did in 1982. He retired in 1991. Rubin was one of the first North Carolinians to receive the Governor's Medal. It cited the host of young authors whom he had launched through Algonquin.
Burly as a bear, sweet-natured as a lamb, he is generous beyond belief in devoting his skills to improving others' manuscripts - which is why so many will rejoice now in his boisterous yet sensitive ``The Heat of the Sun'' (Longstreet, $21.95).
It traces two quests. A Washington and Lee graduate from Roanoke, Mike Quinn goes as a reporter to Charleston, S.C., in pursuit of a lovely yet fickle socialite. Among classic passages is one in which Mike, feeling inept at a dance, realizes she doesn't love him.
In the other, Professor Launcelot Rosenbaum, 41, awakens, perhaps too late, to the charms of a librarian in the College of Charleston.
Their worlds blend when a power-hungry, shady contractor, father of Mike's ex-fiancee, foists an obnoxious dean onto the college faculty.
A hurricane practically blows the reader off the page. Rubin deals with academia and the newsroom with ease and a satiric touch. They ring true.
A native of Charleston, he conveys that city from the Ashley River's pluff-mud to a ship's grave and stentorian whistle in the harbor. It is a book to revel in - and revisit. ILLUSTRATION: File photo
Louis Rubin Jr., burly as a bear, sweet-natured as a lamb, has
polished many another author's manuscript.
by CNB