See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance\_Bo... Vance Bourjaily, a novelist whose literary career, like those of Norman Mailer and James Jones, emerged out of World War II and whose ambitious novels explored American themes for decades afterward. Mr. Bourjaily (pronounced bor-ZHAY-lee) never achieved the top rank of recognition that was predicted for him after publication of his first novel, “The End of My Life,” in 1947, and he figured prominently when critics made lists of writers who were underappreciated or whose promise had gone unfulfilled. But he had a long and substantial career in letters of the sort that was far more prevalent a half-century ago than it is today. Not only a serious novelist, Mr. Bourjaily was also a teacher who spent more than two decades at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and five years at the University of Arizona before becoming the first director of the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at Louisiana State University. He worked as a journalist and an editor. He wrote short stories, essays and reviews. He was also a serious literary socialite. “Everyone came to Bourjaily’s parties in the early 1950s,” Esquire magazine said about him in the 1980s, naming Mailer, Jones, William Styron and others as attendees. At one party Mr. Bourjaily introduced Jones to the actor Montgomery Clift, a pairing that would lead to one of Clift’s signature roles, the brooding bugler Prewitt in the film version of Jones’s novel “From Here to Eternity.” Mr. Bourjaily’s novels often explored what it meant to be an American at a particular historical moment. His second book, “The Hound of Earth” (1955), grounded in the cold war, is about an Army scientist who has gone AWOL in guilt-ridden flight after contributing to the development of the atomic bomb. His third, “The Violated” (1958), a psychologically astute profile of four characters over 25 years—a period with World War II at its center—prompted the critic Irving Howe to write that Mr. Bourjaily was “one of the few serious young novelists who has tried to go directly toward the center of postwar experience.” His other books include “Confessions of a Spent Youth,” a picaresque, autobiographical tale largely about the war and sex; “The Man Who Knew Kennedy,” which tells of the decline into suicide of a young man who seemingly has everything, and which reflects Mr. Bourjaily’s view that the nation’s golden postwar years were curtailed by the assassination of the president in 1963; and “Brill Among the Ruins,” a Vietnam-era parable focusing on a middle-age Midwestern lawyer. As generally well reviewed as these and other books of his were, Mr. Bourjaily seemed always to be measured against his first, “The End of My Life,” which was commissioned by the editor Maxwell Perkins while Mr. Bourjaily was still in the Army. The novel, about a young man coping with his war experiences, was lavishly praised by the critic John W. Aldridge in his influential book “After the Lost Generation.” Aldridge drew comparisons to Fitzgerald and Hemingway. “No book since ‘This Side of Paradise’ has caught so well the flavor of youth in wartime,” Aldridge wrote, “and no book since ‘A Farewell to Arms’ has contained so complete a record of the loss of that youth in war.” Vance Nye Bourjaily was born in Cleveland on Sept. 17, 1922. His father, Monte Ferris Bourjaily, a Lebanese immigrant, was a journalist who became editor of the United Features Syndicate. His mother, Barbara Webb, wrote feature articles and romance novels.