THOMAS SANCHEZ - LIFE AND WORKS
Alfred Knopf & Vintage Books @ Penquin Random House
Thomas Sanchez’ life and works illuminate a belief in spiriting experience, artistry, wit and wisdom into books and films. A 9th generation Californian born days after his father was killed in World War II. As a boy sent to an orphanage-boarding school with Whites, Blacks, Native Americans and Latinos. As a young man Sanchez worked various jobs in California, long distance truck driver in Central Valley, carpenter in Marin hills, rancher in Sierra mountains.
Throughout 1960s in California, Sanchez participated in many of the eras iconic social and political events, labor strikes in the Central Valley, tumultuous U.C. Berkeley Free Speech Movement, counter-culture explosion in legendary Haight-Ashbury District.
During his twenties Sanchez dedicated seven years to writing RABBIT BOSS while living below the poverty line. The novel recounts the tragedy and triumph of a proud peoples’ spirit. It is the profoundly moving 100 year saga of a Native American family who survived against all odds through the California Gold Rush, the Silver Rush, the building of railroads, forest clear-cutting, damming of rivers, freeway dissections and ultimate dispossession of ancestral lands.
Sanchez was in the confidence of Washo Indian Elders born in the 1890s and worked together for years with Native Americans on cattle ranches. Sanchez fought alongside Native Americans in the violent 1973 Siege of Wounded Knee, where he was presented by Lakota Sioux Elders with a sacred warrior amulet to protect him in battle. The first Indian to die in the Wounded Knee Siege was a Cherokee who Sanchez risked his life to guide in across the Dakota Badlands and through the U.S. Government “shoot-to-kill” military zone.
RABBIT BOSS - CRITICAL ACCLAIM
*** New York Times Great Novels of California List
*** “Hailed as a landmark of our literature.” - Vanity Fair
*** “Etched in unforgettable prose. Sanchez is to be congratulated.” - Vine Deloria, Standing Rock Sioux, author of Custer Died For Your Sins
*** “Like One Hundred Years of Solitude will haunt the conscience of history forever.” Figaro France
*** “An understanding of the Indians’ transition of cultures.”
George Morrison, Chippewa Tribe, Minneapolis Tribune
Sanchez' second novel, ZOOT-SUIT MURDERS, set in 1940s Los Angeles, explores a chaotic wartime homeland of tough barrio gangs, Communist hysteria, bizarre religious cults and undercover government agents.
ZOOT-SUIT MURDERS CRITICAL ACCLAIM
*** “May be the best of the home-front novels of World War II.” - Los Angeles Times
*** “Powerful fiction, a vivid tale of political intrigue by a master of pictorial detail. - Chicago Tribune
*** “A deeply political book told in hauntingly lyrical prose.” - Washington Post
In the 1980s Sanchez traveled throughout the American tropics and was in harm's way during the civil wars of Guatemala and El Salvador, where he traversed political and physical jungles with guerrilla fighters, renegade priests, CIA spooks and hard-bitten war journalists. Much of this made its way into Sanchez' third novel, MILE ZERO, a generational panoramic of ship-wreckers, drug pirates and gun-runners on the island of Key West.
MILE ZERO - CRITICAL ACCLAIM
*** “Forges a new world vision. Rich in the intertextuality of Steinbeck and Cervantes.” - Los Angeles Times
*** “Dazzling...masterpiece...bursting with vital characters.”
-- New York Times
*** “A holy terror of a book of immense power and passion.”
- Washington Post
*** “Myth-making and magical.” - Vanity Fair
In 2000, after living in Spain, Paris and Provence, Sanchez published DAY OF THE BEES. The novel explores the hidden life of a French woman transformed from a Spanish artist's muse into a Resistance fighter.
DAY OF THE BEES - CRITICAL ACCLAIM
*** Sanchez awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic.
*** “A literary landmark, a novel of unforgettable power about love and war, art and freedom.” - Le Monde France
*** “A mystery of the heart... lush and haunting...absolutely transporting.” - Philadelphia Inquirer
At the beginning of the 21st century Sanchez returned to the tropics for his fifth novel, KING BONGO. The novel is set against the glamor and intrigue of pre-revolutionary 1950s Havana, where Cuban and American cultures collided with explosive geo-political consequence. Sanchez was the only American novelist to interview in Havana, Mario Morales Mesa, famed Cuban Revolutionary fighter and head of the Narcotics and Gangster Bureaus.
KING BONGO - CRITICAL ACCLAIM
*** “An exotic portrait of sex, violence, corruption and conspiracy in Cuba.”
- Washington Post
*** “Big picture epic story-telling full of believable myth. - San Francisco Chronicle
*** “A passport into Cuba’s many layers, comfortable with the sun-kissed and damned.” --Miami Herald
For his sixth novel, AMERICAN TROPIC, Sanchez returned to America’s Southernmost Point, the exotic island of Key West. The novel illuminates a world of ecological rage and striking revelations as it propels through a complex maze populated by defenders of America’s only Continental reef, rapacious developers, ruthless scammers, destroyers of marine life and common folk engaged in defiant acts to save the eco-system of their paradise.
AMERICAN TROPIC - CRITICAL ACCLAIM
*** “A power packed thriller. Rises to the level of ferocious dramatic polemic against some of the worst crimes against nature and humanity.” - San Francisco Chronicle
*** “A fever dream eco-thriller...a sense of near apocalyptic doom. - Booklist
*** “Swift moving with timely message. Print equivalent of a Robert Altman film.” - Richmond Times Dispatch
As writer and director, Sanchez developed a documentary film, LIFE AFTER LIFE, based on the last living member of the original iconic Actors Studio who survived as a boy eleven concentration camps during World War II.
Sanchez awarded grants from National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation,
honored by French Minister of Culture as Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. Recipient of PEN Lifetime
Achievement Award and Hubert Howe Bancroft Founder of University of California Bancroft Library Award.
A feature film documentary, "Fire Of Words:Writer Warrior Thomas Sanchez," is being
filmed in Paris, Havana, Mallorca, Key West, San Francisco, Miami and Wounded Knee South Dakota.
Thomas Sanchez Life & Literary Works archived at University of California Bancroft Library Special Collections.
Sanchez novels published by Alfred Knopf Vintage Books at Penguin Random House and Gallimard, France..
Contact: Vintage Books Penguin Random House New York & Thomas Sanchez Official Web Site.
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