Fathers and Sons: Passing Down Words from One Generation to the Next

Max Apple could see the signs in his son Sam.

While the two watched Houston Rockets basketball games together, Sam would curl up against his father during the most pivotal moments. Sam did the same thing during dramatic scenes of the British television drama The Jewel in the Crown.

“He had to hug me,” Max says. “He would worry about all the right things.”

Max, a highly respected postmodernist fiction writer and professor at Rice University, did not fully grasp the reality of the situation until Sam was in sixth grade. One day, Sam came home with a story he had written about boxer Mike Tyson taking over as a school gym teacher.

Then, Max knew. His son was a writer.

“When I read that paper, the light bulb went off. I saw that this kid can really write,” Max says, then begins to laugh. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

Decades later, Max Apple and Sam Apple have carved niches for themselves in the literary world. With story collections such as The Oranging of America, Max is one of the most well-respected postmodernist writers in American letters. Sam’s writing has spanned genres from children’s books to memoir and notably into science writing, with his book Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection.

“(Max) was very successful, particularly in literary circles when I was growing up, but it played less a part than you might think,” Sam says of his father’s influence on him becoming a writer. “Certainly, it played a role in one important way. I grew up with an awareness that you could be a writer. Some people don’t even think of that as a realistic career.”

Words have been passed from parents to children for millennia. The Apples exemplify the connective tissue linking one generation to the next. The bond between father and son extends beyond literary lineage, though. They are both university professors who have helped countless writers achieve their own success. They also share a devotion to each other and their family that is even more important to them than their careers.

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Russian writer Maxim Gorky is credited with saying, “Whether or not one becomes a writer depends on whether one had a grandmother."

Max’s journey toward writing began with his grandmother who was from Poland, or Lithuania or Russia, depending on where the borders were drawn at any given portion of the 20^th century. Max and his parents lived with his grandparents in Michigan. Max’s grandmother loved America. As an immigrant, her version of her new country and the people within it was wry and comical. This led to Max viewing the world with a humorous and satirical eye.

Max also grew up speaking Yiddish to his parents and grandparents. He did not even know that he was not speaking English until he went to kindergarten. This led to a fascination with the English language.

“The way to be in America is to be good in English,” Max says. “My two older sisters and I were all English majors. That’s not an accident.”

Max’s love for English and his eye for the comical aspects of people and culture fit in perfectly with the postmodernist writing movement of the 1970s. It was an objectively absurd time in America with the Vietnam War raging abroad as disco roared at home. The time demanded a form of writing like postmodernism: skeptical, humorous, playful and obsessed with the absurd, to try to make sense of it. It was fertile ground for legendary writers like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Max Apple.

In assessing the Gorky quote as it relates to Sam, great grandmothers should be considered.

“Sam has a lot of the same absurdist perceptions of the world that I got from my grandmother, which he obviously got from me,” Max says. “But it was not anything I tried to teach him.”

While Max may have always had inklings that his son would be a writer, Sam traces his literary origin story back to his ninth-grade English class, which he mostly hated. For one assignment, though, Sam wrote a comical short story. Somehow his good friend Mason got his hands on the story and proceeded to read it aloud to the class. The class found Sam’s writing hilarious.

“That was my first taste of people enjoying what I have to say,” Sam says. “It’s fun hearing people laugh at your work. That planted the seed a little bit.”

Sam began getting positive feedback on his writing later in high school and in college. At a certain point, it became clear that he was not going to have a career that involved math, and he gravitated toward prose. Soon, he was publishing articles and then full-length books including the memoirs, Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria’s Jewish Past with Its Last Wandering Shepard and American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland. Eventually, Sam’s interest in metabolic health led him toward science and the work of Nobel Prizewinning chemist Otto Warburg.

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It may seem like postmodernist fiction and science writing reside in completely opposite ends of the literary world. And yet, the similarities between the two genres are striking. Both science writing and postmodernism are fascinated by the system, be it the system of science, or capitalism, or America or Nazi Germany. Both forms also attempt to analyze the system and the people residing within it in unique ways.

“I'm someone who very much believes in objective truths and that science can arrive at truth,” Sam says. “But truth is only one piece of the puzzle. When it comes to science, it's so much about the human elements of reputation, information and entering the zeitgeist at the right moment. Postmodernism reflects that and plays with truth, inverting reality. You appreciate how much absurd human comedy there is surrounding what we hope are objective truths.”

Oranging, published in 1974, follows the fictional exploits of real-life businessman Howard Johnson, of ice cream and motel chain fame. The plot takes readers inside Johnson’s 1964 Cadillac limousine as Johnson, his chauffeur Otis and his assistant Millie drive across the country plotting new motels. Johnson is credited with a mythical ability to plan for motels at just the right spots. When a new motel is created, Millie ceremoniously notes it on a map.

Max writes, “nothing gave the ice-cream king greater pleasure than watching Mildred with her fine touch, and using the original crayon, turn an empty white dot into an orange fulfillment.”

Oranging also looks at the irony of a capitalist life so resplendent that the fear of losing it to death drives Millie to an obsession with being resurrected by cryonics.

Max writes in such detail about Howard Johnson that it is easy to believe that he spent months researching the man. Not so.

“No research at all,” Max says. “It was all imagination.”

Half a century after its publication, the story remains a postmodernist classic. It is revered by critics and has been widely anthologized.

“When people ask me, ‘Who are the comic geniuses among writers?’ Max Apple is always one of my three recommendations,” says Al Filreis, the faculty director at University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House. “That's how funny he is. The Oranging of America is the funniest and most brilliantly satirical and risky book that I have read. It is an absolute masterpiece. It's completely brilliant.”

In Ravenous, published in 2022, Sam invites readers inside the world of Nazi Germany. The country was capable of giving the world some of history’s greatest scientists including Warburg and Albert Einstein. And yet, the country was also deranged enough to usher in the Holocaust.

One of the ways Sam reveals the system of Nazi Germany is by sharing the antisemitic German fable of The Eternal Jew. Readers are allowed to see how normal and ingrained hatred for Jews was well before the Nazis came into power.

“I found that to be a powerful metaphor for Jewish history,” Sam says, of The Eternal Jew. “It’s just one of those folk tales that really gets to the heart of Jewish experience.”

A notable trait of Max’s writing is that he is always kind to his subjects. While postmodernism writing can often be cutting and even just plain mean, Max treats his characters and the systems with a soft touch, allowing the reader to draw out absurdity for themselves.

Warburg was a polarizing figure as a gifted chemist, a man of Jewish heritage and a Nazi by association. Ravenous treats Warburg with the same kindness Oranging treats Howard Johnson. The hilarity is omnipresent, though, including this description of Warburg arriving at a symposium in Strassburg: “a long black Mercedes pulled up with the license plate that read “MP-B1” (Max Planck Society–Berlin One). The chauffeur emerged from the car first and opened a back seat door. As the crowd looked on with anticipation, Warburg stepped out of the vehicle in a beige suit with what Fuller described as a “10-gallon Cowboy hat” on his head. At age 81, Otto Warburg had finally gone full diva.”

Perhaps the most postmodernist framing in Ravenous is presenting the character of Adolf Hitler as a sugar addicted hypochondriac who is petrified of cancer.

Sam writes: “Hitler’s focus on diet and cancer only intensified after he became chancellor. In 1933, eager to learn more about health and vegetarianism, he met with an 80-year-old healer known for her herbal and cold-water cures. Later that day, when a Gestapo officer tried to turn his attention to political matters, Hitler grew agitated: 'What this old woman told me this morning is far more important than anything I can do in my life.'”

Sam says that it was important to him to show Hitler as more than an evil mass murderer.

“Genocide is often inspired by a strong main character like Hitler,” Sam says. “With the distance of history, you can see the absurdity in those figures. There's nothing funny about it. But Hitler was an absurd, pathetic figure in so many ways. I just wanted to bring that out.”

David Kaplan, a journalist and longtime friend of both Max and Sam, says that whether the Apples are writing fiction or science journalism, he can see the parallels between father and son.

“I just love the way both of them write,” Kaplan says. “I see similarities just in how clear the writing is, and their sense of humor. I often read both of them, and say, ‘They got every word just right.’”

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The Apples’ bibliography is extensive. On top of his memoirs and science writing, Sam has published multiple children’s books, including Baby Dunks-a-Lot, which he coauthored with NBA superstar Jayson Tatum. Max’s work includes Zip: A Novel of the Left and the Right, Roommates: My Grandfather’s Story, I Love Gootie: My Grandmother’s Story, and the short story collection, The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories.

The literary lineage of the Apples has extended from the page into the classroom.

At 84 years old, Max still teaches one class a semester at University of Pennsylvania.

“I still love it,” Max says, “because every semester is new.”

Max has a reputation for being a very tough teacher. But he also has a reputation for being immensely kind. Max often spends breaks in his workshops at the Kelly Writers House making students coffee and bringing them cookies.

“Students take his courses knowing full well that he's going to be incredibly honest about their writing. And yet they love him,” says Filreis. “He is disarming in his lightness, his humor and his sweetness. He is the best.”

Sam also found himself following Max into the world of academia, becoming a senior lecturer and the assistant director of the Johns Hopkins MA in Science Writing program.

Originally, Sam thought of teaching as a side profession to subsidize his writing. That view has changed over the years, though.

“Now I really think of it as my vocation, and writing comes second,” Sam says. “I love being a teacher. I love working with students. I feel like I've done enough writing. I hope to keep writing and publishing. But it's time for me to also help others achieve.”

Former Johns Hopkins MA in Science Writing program director Melissa Hendricks says that even though she hired Sam, she learned a lot from watching him teach over the years.

“His approach is very gentle and warm and fun-loving,” Hendricks says. “It’s not unusual to have students laughing in his classes and just enjoying themselves and not taking themselves too seriously. He brings fun and humor and delight into the classroom. He has a really lovely way of connecting with students and making learning fun.”

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A truism inside the world of comedy is that often the greatest humor comes from people who have experienced the greatest sorrow. The Apples are no strangers to pain.

Max’s wife and Sam’s mother, Debbie, was ill with multiple sclerosis when Sam was a child. Max increasingly became the primary caretaker for Sam and his sister Jessica.

Kaplan remembers being at the dinner table with Max and his children and seeing the way Max treated them as peers. Kaplan also remembers watching Max help his children fall asleep by telling them fictionalized stories about his own childhood, similar to the stories that Max’s grandmother would tell him.

“When Debbie got sicker, Max was in charge of the kids,” Kaplan says. “And he was so devoted to them. Max treated them as equals in a way. He had that camaraderie which helped them express themselves and feel confident in themselves. And the way he fed their imaginations, that had to be so good for them.”

Max’s devotion to his family continued with his daughter, Sam’s half-sister, Elisheva, who had cerebral palsy. Over the last several decades, Max stepped back from writing to care for Elisheva, who passed away in the last year.

Sam has three children of his own. He says that the devotion to family is, “the single most important lesson I learned from my father.”

“He basically gave up his writing career to become a full-time caretaker for Elisheva over the last few decades,” Sam continues. “That was just such a powerful example that what matters most in life is ultimately family and your children. Being a writer is certainly important, but there are a lot of things that come first.

“I know so many writers of his age that continue to be caught up in this cycle of needing fame, needing attention, needing one more publication. And I get caught up in that myself sometimes. But seeing the last decades of his career, it grounds me and reminds me of what’s ultimately important.”

With his focus on his family, Sam has taken note that the Apple literary lineage may continue with one of his daughters who is showing signs of being a writer.

There is a long tradition of children following in the footsteps of their parent, as well as those who rebel against the familial path. Howard Johnson’s father, John, was an entrepreneur, albeit an unsuccessful one. Warburg went into chemistry rather than follow in the footsteps of his father Emil, who was a prominent German physicist.

“There’s a problem of not wanting to be in your father’s shadow,” Sam says. “You don’t want to compete. Warburg had a similar story. That’s why he didn’t become a physicist.”

Writing can be a hard and lonely path. Max would not have wished being a writer on anyone, especially his son. But he is certainly proud of their literary lineage.

“When I write anything, Sam is my first reader,” Max says. “I admire him enormously as a writer. I didn’t know that Sam would follow me so closely. It looks like it’s pre-planned, but it’s the opposite. The actual career stuff is purely accidental. It’s pretty wonderful, though.”