of his arm. Though he was awarded the Bronze Star for his service, he repeatedly declined to talk about it; companion Marilyn Hill explained that he was embarrassed by the fact that it wasn't enemy fire that wounded him, but his own gun that had misfired, blasting shrapnel into his shoulder. After the war ended, Eastlake accepted an invitation to join an army buddy in Switzerland and start a small literary magazine. Unfortunately, the backer withdrew support after only one issue, so the Eastlakes moved to Paris, where Martha had lived once before as an art student. The literary magazine Essai contains Eastlake's first published story, Ishimoto's Land. In 1955 he bought a 400-acre ranch in the Jemez Mountains near Cuba, New Mexico, which became a mecca for writers Julian Huxley, Edward Abbey, Robert Creeley et al. Eastlake's 1965 book Castle Keep, about U.S. soldiers trying to defend a Belgian castle filled with art treasures during the 1944 Battle of the Bulge was made into the 1969 movie Castle Keep, directed by Sydney Pollack, starring Burt Lancaster, Patrick O'Neal, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Bruce Dern, and Peter Falk. Works Go in Beauty (1956) Bronc People (1958) Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (1963) Castle Keep (1965) The Bamboo Bed (1969) , Dancers in the Scalp House (1975) The Long, Naked Descent into Boston (1977) A Child's Garden of Verses for the Revolution (1970) Jack Armstrong in Tangier (1984) References External links biography 1917 births 1997 deaths 20th-century American novelists American male novelists 20th-century American male writers