Stories about the death of Tristan Egolf continue to appear with new information, although the first few paragraphs of Friday’s Los Angeles Times report by Valerie J. Nelson bear a noticeable resemblance to Saturday’s Associated Press wire story (see yesterday’s MobyLives news digest), including a quote from Egolf’s friend Michael Hoober, which Nelson says he made to the Times, yet which is identical to a Hoober quote in the later AP story. In any event, Nelson offers more detail than any story so far on the growing legend of Egolf: “After 76 publishers had rejected the novel, Egolf was playing guitar for money on a bridge in Paris when a young woman noticed his cold, sockless feet and invited him for coffee. Her father happened to be a prize-winning author, Patrick Modiano, who took Egolf’s book to his French publishing house, which agreed to publish it.” Original reports put Egolf’s rejection at 70 publishers; Egolf’s bio note posted at the website of his American publisher, Grove/Atlantic, puts it at “more than 70,” and says only his “discovery” while “busking to pay his rent on the Pont des Arts” saved him. In a 1999 interview with Teenja.com, Egolf himself tells a far calmer story: he met Modiano’s daughter while playing in public and got to know the family over a period of years. As for the multiple rejections: he says it may have been 76 total, but he sometimes got multiple form rejections from one publisher, and he also got some encouraging notes. On the whole, he says, “I’d wager that of those seventy-six rejections, only three or four people had actually looked at the book. In the end, I think it got picked up pretty fast.”

• UPDATE: Note that since MobyLives ran the above item, the Grove/Atlantic website has taken down the elaborate biographical note MobyLives quoted, and has replaced with one stating, simply: “Author Bio Tristan Egolf: Born in 1971 and raised in Pennsylvania, Tristan Egolf was the also the author of Lord of the Barnyard, Skirt and the Fiddle, and Kornwolf. He passed away on May 7, 2005.”