Not Even Immortality Lasts Forever

A good story has a mind of its own and knows exactly where it wants to go; it seeksits truth the way water seeks its own level. But where is the line between memoryand imagination, between nonfiction and the telling of a good story? In the mostlytrue stories that make up Not Even Immortality Lasts Forever, Ed McClanahan intrepidlytests the limits of that distinction.

This gathering of fiction-infused autobiographical stories opens in the postwar 1940swith the sudden, brief appearance of an itinerant street performer in McClanahan’s sleepyrural Kentucky hometown, an elderly bicyclist whose artistry seems, to the fourteen-year-old narrator, almost divinely inspired. Subsequent stories trace McClanahan’suneasy but ultimately tender relationship with his no-nonsense “bidnessman” fatherand, simultaneously, his growing awareness of his own calling as a writer. McClanahanwrites his way into the fabled Stanford University Creative Writing Program and formslasting friendships with Ken Kesey and his then-notorious cohort, the Merry Pranksters.

After returning to Kentucky in the 1970s, McClanahan published his long-awaitednovel, The Natural Man, in 1983, the first of seven well-received books. In 2019, he wasinducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.