Like his protagonist, Utah author uses magic in his craft

Finding himself caught in a vise between the pressures to finish either medical school or law school, the writing-obsessed young man threw his typewriter out the window, trying to rid himself of the curse. It didn't work.

Trying to keep up with his law studies at Columbia while slyly reading the 100 greatest books and writing a sonnet, David Kranes suffered a breakdown.

"I was determined to be a responsible member of society," he said during an interview in his home. "That seemed to mean law school or med school. The hunger and the need for creativity hit me at a young age, but it took me quite awhile to give myself permission to do that."

Now professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah, where he has been since 1967, Kranes is the author of 50 plays and six novels, including his most recent, "Making the Ghost Dance," a delightful book about the life of a fictional magician.

Kranes eventually discarded his marginal interest in law and medicine and earned a Ph.D. in playwriting at Yale Drama School.

He said he had an exciting time at Yale, where he wrote five plays in three years and then watched them staged with audiences and lights. "I don't know where you'd get that experience except in a place like Yale. I was very fortunate to work with people who respected the writer."

While there, Kranes also wrote a novel and a couple of stories. "Some people have called me 'driven,' but my wife (Carole) says I'm just 'diligent.' "

He has had a wonderful career teaching playwriting and creative writing while laboring on his own novels and plays. Few writers besides Joyce Carole Oates have written in so many different genres. "Sometimes I was probably too rigorous. I worked across the forms, the way Europeans do."

In fact, Kranes' mind was so rigorous that in his early years in Utah, when he had little time for the typewriter, he used to write three to four pages in his head. "We were living on Michigan Avenue then, and I used the time before dinner to write down those four pages."

That was the way he steadily wrote a novel titled "Margins." "I remember that classes ended in May. In June I finished the book, sent it to an agent, did some teaching in Connecticut — and by the time I was on my way back at the end of the summer, she had already sold it to Knopf. Nothing since then has been that easy."

He also loves Utah and the West, and has no interest in returning to his native Boston — despite the strong statement made to him by a friend when he moved here: "Going to Utah will be intellectual suicide." Kranes has not found that to be true.