George Mandel


George Mikali Mandel is an American author and early writer of the Beat Generation. His novels, interviews, novellas, cartoons and short stories have been carried major print magazines and collections. He has also contributed key elements to screenplays for Hollywood films.

Biography

George Mandel was born in New York City. Mandel was educated at the Pratt Institute, The Art Students League of New York and The New School.
Before the war Mandel was a cartoonist whose drawings established the first masked female comicbook hero, The Woman in Red.
He did a tour of duty during World War 2. He is a Purple Heart veteran of multiple wounds in four World War 2 campaigns.
In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
The National World War II Museum gratefully added to its collection his essay, "Men Weep," which he contributed in September 2014. It is an account of his service and his reaction to the Battle of the Bulge.

Works

His first book, Flee the Angry Strangers, was one of the first Beat novels. His subsequent works include The Breakwater, a coming-of-age novel and Proustian examination of pre-war Coney Island; a 1961 war novella Into the Woods of the World, and The Wax Boom, a war novel. His novella Scapegoats is a commentary on New York City's racial tension and urban renewal. He further explored the theme in Crocodile Blood, an epic about the rape of a Native American Seminole and the rising complex of cultures across three generations in Florida. His early short story "The Beckoning Sea" was included in the 1958 anthology Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men.
A darkly humorous piece, "Adjustments", appeared in a 1963 Alfred Hitchcock horror anthology and short story, "The Day the Time Changed" in a 1965 Saturday Evening Post. Two cartoon books have been published, Beatville U.S.A. and Borderline Cases.