Finding himself caught in a vise between the pressures to finish either medical school or law school, the writing-obsessed young man threw his typewriter out the window, trying to rid himself of the curse. It didn't work.
Trying to keep up with his law studies at Columbia while slyly reading the 100 greatest books and writing a sonnet, David Kranes suffered a breakdown.
"I was determined to be a responsible member of society," he said during an interview in his home. "That seemed to mean law school or med school. The hunger and the need for creativity hit me at a young age, but it took me quite awhile to give myself permission to do that."
Now professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah, where he has been since 1967, Kranes is the author of 50 plays and six novels, including his most recent, "Making the Ghost Dance," a delightful book about the life of a fictional magician.
Kranes eventually discarded his marginal interest in law and medicine and earned a Ph.D. in playwriting at Yale Drama School.
He said he had an exciting time at Yale, where he wrote five plays in three years and then watched them staged with audiences and lights. "I don't know where you'd get that experience except in a place like Yale. I was very fortunate to work with people who respected the writer."
While there, Kranes also wrote a novel and a couple of stories. "Some people have called me 'driven,' but my wife (Carole) says I'm just 'diligent.' "
He has had a wonderful career teaching playwriting and creative writing while laboring on his own novels and plays. Few writers besides Joyce Carole Oates have written in so many different genres. "Sometimes I was probably too rigorous. I worked across the forms, the way Europeans do."
In fact, Kranes' mind was so rigorous that in his early years in Utah, when he had little time for the typewriter, he used to write three to four pages in his head. "We were living on Michigan Avenue then, and I used the time before dinner to write down those four pages."
That was the way he steadily wrote a novel titled "Margins." "I remember that classes ended in May. In June I finished the book, sent it to an agent, did some teaching in Connecticut — and by the time I was on my way back at the end of the summer, she had already sold it to Knopf. Nothing since then has been that easy."
He also loves Utah and the West, and has no interest in returning to his native Boston — despite the strong statement made to him by a friend when he moved here: "Going to Utah will be intellectual suicide." Kranes has not found that to be true.
Prolific and disarmingly modest, Kranes has written several novels that have not yet seen the light of day. He has a sequel to "The Hunting Years," an early short-story collection; a father-son book in which he explores the way that fathers and sons often change places; and he has felt the urge to write one book of detective fiction, and he has started another.
In fact, "Making the Ghost Dance" is a book he wrote 15 years ago, and it has been with Signature Books for five years. The magic tricks practiced by the protagonist in the book are familiar to Kranes because he spent his youth in an identical path. "I found out how to hold an audience, and I put myself through a master's degree doing magic shows for children."
In recent years, he brought card tricks into the teaching of writing — "sleight of hand vs. verbal sleights of hand — the notion that there is a secret in every work, and it hides in the narrative, and you wonder when the secret will surface. So that's the hidden card that rises out of the deck."
Kranes is also like his character in his early stumbles at school. "I was a troublemaker, and I was thrown out of school several times. My father would tell me, 'Your teachers say you are very bright but you could be doing much better. You may not get into college.'
"So in my senior year I did very well. I tested well and that got me into a good school, Bowdoin College in Maine."
He wrote "Ghost" as simply as he could. He loves language so much that he believes he has sometimes "overdone it. I like finding the startling phrase. I like to play with words — and I have a knack for the playful use of words.
"I don't know how I got it. A woman once called me 'Metaphor Man' — and it was not a compliment."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com