literary craftsman

Jon Robin Baitz, a gifted literary craftsman who secured a commercial run for “Other Desert Cities” only in 2011, at age 50, says: “I’m like many people in that I don’t discriminate in quite the same way as writers once did between Broadway and off-Broadway. But I will admit that my fiscal fortunes were on the upswing during ‘Other Desert Cities.’

His books were, in the eyes of some critics, too orderly — well balanced in each line, showing the hand of a true literary craftsman, yet displaying little in the way of heart and emotion.

He is, after all, that rarest of creatures — a literary craftsman who also sells books.

The literary craftsman’s term for what Wallace is doing within the Erdedy interlude is free indirect style, but while reading Wallace you get the feeling that bloodless matters of craftsmanship rather bored him.

No writer of equal power was ever so little of a literary craftsman.