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In the fall of 1973, William Robins, an undergraduate English major at Washington University, St. Louis, entered the first day of the "Art of the Novel" class along with 30 other students.

The professor, clad in a sports shirt and blue jeans, was physically imposing and possessed a deep voice. He announced to the class that rather than handing out the syllabus, he would read aloud his screenplay on the relationship between photographer Robert Capa and Ernest Hemingway during World War II. Further confusing the class, the professor stated that Capa never actually had any relationship with Hemingway, other than momentarily greeting him at a bar.

The professor read his screenplay for 30 minutes, bid the class farewell, and left. The professor was Stanley Elkin, one of the great American writers of the post-war era.

When he entered Elkin's class that first day, Robins had not read any of the professor's writings, let alone known that he was even a novelist. Since that September day, in which he signed up for the class simply because it fit into his schedule and fulfilled a distribution requirement, Robins has gone on to author a dissertation on Elkin as well as the recently published "Stanley Elkin: A Comprehensive Bibliography" (Lanham MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2009).

The bibliography has been in the works for more than 20 years. Robins completed his dissertation in 1986 at the University of South Carolina, and has been adding primary and secondary sources to the bibliography ever since.

"It includes everything I could find that would be useful to scholars and readers," Robins said.

After Elkin passed away in 1995, Robins began to pursue the project more earnestly, recognizing the need to preserve the memory and works of the deceased author.

Robins, who is currently the administrator and municipal clerk in the borough of Dunellen, considers Elkin as one of the great American-Jewish authors, along with the likes of Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow.

"Elkin spoke to me in a Jewish voice," Robins said, citing the prominent themes that recur through many of the author's works: Diaspora, the immigrant experience, and the relationship between first and second generation American Jews. According to Robins, Elkin, without being overt, showed "how Jews helped transform America."

Elkin was born in Brooklyn in 1930, and spent his childhood and adolescence in Chicago. He was educated at the University of Illinois, from which he received his Ph.D. in English, completing his dissertation on William Faulkner. Elkin spent most of his adult life as a professor in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught from 1960 until his death in 1995. The author of 10 novels, two volumes of novellas, two books of short stories, a collection of essays, and one screenplay, Elkin never gained the mass appeal of writers like Heller or Bellow.

Robins attributes his relative lack of popularity to his preoccupation with the stylistic elements of the novel -- his concern with language rather than plot or character development.

"His writings are accessible," Robins said, "though without preparation they are a slight hurdle." Robins recommends that readers unfamiliar with Elkin begin with his novellas.

Despite having never achieved the level of popularity that some of his contemporaries enjoyed, Elkin was well regarded by critics and within academic circles. Elkin was twice the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for both "George Mills" in 1982 and "Mrs. Ted Bliss," his last novel, in 1995.

In the book's preface, Robins draws parallels between Elkin's own writings and the project of compiling his bibliography.

"One of the universals I identified in Elkin's fiction was a certain preoccupation in his characters to discover the mystery of life," Robins wrote. "It's possible that my passion for his writing, and my desire to make this as complete a bibliography as I can, is because I can relate to this single-minded, ineluctable obsession for answer."

"Stanley Elkin: A Comprehensive Bibliography" is available for purchase through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and The Scarecrow Press.