I was unaware that when Hunter Thompson was a young writer he typed out “The Great Gatsby” and “The Sun Also Rises” to deconstruct how F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway achieved their effects and created their masterpieces.
That wasn’t the primary motivation that found Tim Youd sitting on the porch of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY, last week pounding out James Salter’s “Light Years” on an IBM Correcting Selectric III typewriter -- similar to the machine Salter used to write the novel in the first place.
However, Mr. Youd isn’t a budding novelist. He’s a performance artist and he’s been traveling the Hudson Valley since April when he retyped Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” at various locations on the campus of Vassar College. Ms. McCarthy attended the school before achieving fame and fortune with her novel that follows eight fictional Vassar women after they graduate in 1933.
