Harold Brodkey (October 25, 1930 – January 26, 1996), born Aaron Roy Weintraub, was an American short-story writer and novelist. Life Brodkey was the second child born in Staunton, Illinois, to Max Weintraub and Celia Glazer Weintraub (1899-1932); Samuel Weintraub (1928-2017) was their oldest child. He was Jewish. When their birth mother Celia died, Samuel Weintraub was four and old enough to remain with his father but Aaron Weintraub, only two years old, was adopted by his father's cousin, Doris Rubenstein Brodkey (1896-1949) and her husband, Joseph Brodkey (1896-1946) and renamed Harold Roy Brodkey. Doris and Joseph lived in University City, Missouri, with their daughter, Marilyn Ruth Brodkey (1923-2011). Brodkey would chronicle his life with his adoptive parents and sister in his short stories and his novel, The Runaway Soul. After graduating from Harvard University with an A.B. cum laude in 1952, Brodkey married his first wife, Joanna Brown, a Radcliffe graduate and, in 1953 their only child, Ann Emily Brodkey was born. With the aid of his editor, William Maxwell, a childhood friend of his wife, Brodkey began his writing career by contributing short stories to The New Yorker and other magazines. His stories received two first-place O. Henry Awards. Brodkey was a staff writer for The New Yorker until the end of his life. In 1993 he announced in The New Yorker that he had contracted AIDS; he later wrote This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (1996), about his battle with the disease. At the time of his death in 1996, he was living in New York City with his second wife, novelist Ellen Brodkey (née Schwamm). Brodkey contracted the HIV virus from a homosexual relationship, though he reportedly did not consider himself to be gay. The author is most famous for his breathtaking conversational skills, his progressively more complex text and for taking 32 years to complete his much anticipated first novel, published in 1991 as The Runaway Soul. Literary career Brodkey's career began promisingly with the short-story collection First Love and Other Sorrows, which received widespread critical praise at the time of its 1958 publication. Six years later he signed a book contract with Random House for his first novel, tentatively titled "A Party of Animals" (it was also referred to as "The Animal Corner"). The unfinished novel was subsequently resold to Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1970, then to Knopf in '79. As