He's Come Undone Book

Novelist Rick Hanson's friend swore Mr. Hanson had to read her cousin (Wally Lamb)'s best-seller, She's Come Undone. Lamb, the first male author chosen by Oprah Winfrey's Book Club, had created a strikingly real female protagonist beset by the negative forces of growing up female in America. Before finishing She's Come Undone, Mr. Hanson began writing He's Come Undone.

Bill Lingstrom, the protagonist of He's Come Undone, has experienced the American male requisites of divorced parents/ 2 marriages/ 2 divorces/ 2 children, and at the age of forty-two finally has to come to terms with the pain of all his losses. He has to laugh to begin the tears process, so He's Come Undone becomes a tragicomic look at growing up in the 60s and 70s (with the Cleavers as parents), and a portrait of a man very much in a love/hate relationship with his parents and very much in love with his children, healing from the loss of all four of them.

The protagonist remembers comically the joys and terrors of boyhood in the two-parent middle-class subdivisions of the '60s followed by the light of post-Woodstock teenage hippiedom in mid-America darkened by the pall of Vietnam. He talks about the confusion wrought on males by the fairer sex as they grow up. As the protagonist remembers growing up and getting his first jobs after college, he begins to analyze how messages from American culture (men must be successful, must be sports jocks, must be tough, can't show emotion) have caused him to lose his bearings. In the present day of the novel (1998-1999), Bill comes to terms with his past, his losses, and the messages that have driven him to divorce, loss, and distrust. He's Come Undone brings Bill Lingstrom, the Huck Finn of the baby boomers, full circle out of his hole.

About The Author
Dr. Richard Hanson is a tenured English professor at Jefferson Community College-SW in Louisville, KY, where he has lived his entire life. He is unmarried and has three boys, 23, 18, and 7. Dr. Hanson received his BA and MA in English from the University of Louisville and a PhD in English from the University of Kentucky.
Besides being obsessed with writing and his children, Dr. Hanson enjoys working with an international men's group, the Mankind Project, whose work is to foster mature masculine energy in the world today, and with Native American spiritual practices.
Dr. Hanson enjoys writing in several genres:
Novels
He's Come Undone (Orpheus Press, 2000). An archetypal American male comes to terms with growing up and living as a male in America today. The Remembrance and the Fury (Orpheus Press, 2001). A psychological horror thriller concerning recovering lost memory, satanic worship, and the struggle of a woman to stay sane and keep a relationship with her daughter and a boyfriend intact.

There are other novels in progress.

Screenplays
Warrior. Currently being shopped in Hollywood. A tale of a group of men who have banded together to live sanely in America with the pressures of being a mature male in American culture. Dr. Hanson will direct. The Remembrance and the Fury. Currently being written from the novel. Several other movie proposals and He's Come Undone are now in Hollywood.

College Composition Textbooks
Writing Successfully (Allyn&Bacon, 1996; Orpheus Press 2000) Dr. Hanson is currently planning and executing a reader for freshman composition courses and a developmental rhetoric for underprepared beginning college students.

Literary and Cultural Criticism
Dr. Hanson is revising his dissertation, Manifestations of Fear: Moby-Dick, A Case Study, into a study of anxiety and of Melville for a more general audience.
Dr. Hanson writes literary criticism, which has been published in the Yeats/Eliot Review and in the New Warrior Newsletter. He has written social criticism/personal essays, which have appeared in LEO, Wild Embrace, and the New Warrior Newsletter.

Dr. Hanson also writes short fiction and poetry occasionally, and has had pieces published in Wild Embrace and the New Warrior Newsletter.