Max Frisch at the City College of New York, 1981: Introduction

by Mark Jay Mirsky

Among the rewards of editing Fiction has been my introduction to a number of writers whom I admire. Among them was Max Frisch, the Swiss novelist and playwright. Max was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His body of work contains several novels of profound meditation on the question of human identity, a set of searching memoirs and a number of plays that quickly became classics. In my capacity as a professor of English at The City College of New York, I regularly assign three of Max's novels, I'm Not Stiller, Homo Faber and Gantenbein (in an earlier edition known as A Wilderness of Mirrors) to my graduate students, as models of intricate plotting. Trying to teach undergraduates the skills of writing, passages from Max's memoirs, in which he questions death, have evoked prose of striking originality, even from students whose English is still shaky.

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