David Shields

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David Shields
DavidShields AuthorPhoto.jpg
Born (1956-07-22) July 22, 1956 (age 69) [1]
Los Angeles, California
OccupationWriter/filmmaker/professor
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater
Period1984–present
GenreBook-length essay, Documentary film
Website
www.davidshields.com

David Shields (born July 22, 1956) is an American author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger (2010), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (2008), and Black Planet (1999). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, twice an NEA Fellow, a PEN Revson Award winner, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and the PEN West Award, and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions .

Contents

Shields is a visiting professor at Warren Wilson College and Vermont College of Fine Arts' MFA programs. Since 2010, he has been the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington.

Early life and education

Shields was born in Los Angeles, California, to a lower-middle-class Jewish family. Both of his parents were journalists. He received a B.A. from Brown University (magna cum laude) in 1978; and an M.F.A. with honors from the University of Iowa in 1980. [2]

Career

Academic appointments

Shields in 2013 David Shields 2013.jpg
Shields in 2013

Shields had an appointment as a visiting assistant professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y, from 1985 to 1988. Since 1996, he has been a faculty member in the M.F.A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College. [3]

Writing and film

Shields's debut work of fiction, Heroes: A Novel, about a Midwestern sportswriter's fascination with a college basketball player, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1984. In 1989, Knopf published Shields's second fictional work, Dead Languages: A Novel, [4] a semi-autobiographical novel about a boy growing up with a severe stutter.

Between 1997 and 2009, Shields published five books: Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (1999), with Random House, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN West award for creative nonfiction [5] ; Baseball Is Just Baseball: The Understated Ichiro (2001), Enough About You: Notes toward the New Autobiography (2002), with Simon & Schuster; Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine (2004), [6] with Simon & Schuster; and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (2008), [7] with Knopf, a New York Times bestseller.

In 2010, Shields's tenth book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto , was published by Knopf. In 2019, Lithub named Reality Hunger one of the 100 most important books of the 2010s. [8] In 2011, Norton published The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, an anthology Shields co-edited with Brad Morrow. In 2012, New Harvest published Jeff, One Lonely Guy, a collage co-written by Shields, Jeff Ragsdale, and Michael Logan. Also in that year, Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (2012), an anthology co-edited by Shields and Matthew Vollmer, was published by Norton.

In 2013, Knopf published How Literature Saved My Life, a blend of confessional criticism and cultural autobiography. Also in 2013, Shields and screenwriter and J.D. Salinger documentarian Shane Salerno [9] presented Salinger, published by Simon & Schuster, an "oral biography" of J.D. Salinger. Salinger was a New York Times bestseller [10] and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

In 2017, Other People: Takes & Mistakes was published by Knopf. In 2015, the film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, starring Shields, Caleb Powell, and James Franco, written by Shields and Powell and directed by Franco, was released by First Pond Entertainment. [11]

In 2019,Marshawn Lynch: A History, directed by Shields, shot and edited by James Nugent, and executive produced by Danny Glover, [12] premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF). [13] The film, which Shields also wrote and produced, [14] was an official selection of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2019. [12] [14]

Critical reception

In the spring of 1989, Lance Olsen, writing in the Virginia Quarterly Review , included Shields as part of the “Next Generation of Fiction.” [15] Shields has been referred to as "a pioneer of collage writing", [16] an approach referred to by A.O. Scott as "experimental" in February 1996 in Newsday , in Scott's review of Shields' Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (1996). [17]

A.O. Scott, in a later Shields review that appeared in Newsday (of his Black Planet in 1999), reflected on the earlier-published Remote (1996), suggesting that it should be seen as “one of the definitive texts of the 1990s—a trim, elegant nonfiction answer to [ David Foster Wallace's] Infinite Jest." [18]

In The New York Times Book Review , Lucy Sante wrote that the book “urgently and succinctly addresses matters that have been in the air, have relentlessly gathered momentum, and have just been waiting for someone to link them together... [Shields's] book probably heralds what will be the dominant modes in years and decades to come.” [19] However, The New Yorker's James Wood called the book “highly problematic” in its “unexamined promotion of what [Shields] insists on calling ‘reality’ over narrative,” despite acknowledging that Shields's “arguments about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken.” [20]

I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, a collaboration between Shields and Caleb Powell, was praised for its erasure of the boundary between mask and self, a frequent theme in Shields's work. In the Atlantic , Leslie Jamison wrote that the book's “goal isn't sympathy or forgiveness. Life is not personal. Life is evidence. It's fodder for argument. To put the ‘I’ to work this way invites a different intimacy—not voyeuristic communion but collaborative inquiry, author and reader facing the same questions from inside their inevitably messy lives.” [21]

Lynch: A History, whose montage approach builds off of the collage style of Shields's books, was a shift to documentary film. In the New Yorker, Hua Hsu wrote, “Lynch feels like the culmination of Shields's career. The film's relentless rhythm overwhelms and overpowers you. Random acts of terror, across time and space, reveal themselves as a pattern. It's a gradient of American carnage.” [22]

Books

Filmography

Film

YearTitleRole
2024How We Got Herewriter, director, producer
2019Lynch: A Historywriter, director, producer
2017I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrelco-writer, co-star

Awards and recognition

References

  1. ↑ "David Shields". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved December 10, 2025.
  2. ↑ "David Shields". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved December 6, 2025.
  3. ↑ "David Shields". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved December 6, 2025.
  4. ↑ "David Shields". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved December 7, 2025.
  5. ↑ "David Shields". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved December 8, 2025.
  6. ↑ "David Shields". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved December 7, 2025.
  7. ↑ "David Shields". Amazon.com. Retrieved December 9, 2025.
  8. ↑ "100 Books That Defined the Decade". Literary Hub. December 28, 2019. Retrieved July 11, 2020.
  9. ↑ LA Daily News Staff (August 28, 2017) [September 2, 2013]. "Unlikely Salinger Detective Spent Decade on Trail". Los Angeles Daily News (DailyNews.com). Retrieved October 30, 2025.
  10. ↑ Taylor, Ihsan. "Best Sellers - The New York Times". The New York Times . Retrieved November 20, 2013.
  11. ↑ "I Think You're Totally Wrong". IMDB. Retrieved December 8, 2025.
  12. 1 2 IDFA Staff (2019). "Marshawn Lynch: A History" (film festival entrant blurb). IDFA.nl. Retrieved October 30, 2025.
  13. ↑ Spletzer, Andy (film description) & Shields, David (director biography) (2019). "Lynch: A History". SIFF.net. Archived from the original (film festival entrant blurb) on July 6, 2020. Retrieved October 30, 2025.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) For the equating of SIFF.net with the Seattle International Film Festival, see this link.
  14. 1 2 Cargo Film and Paradigm Studio Staffs (August 16, 2024) [2019]. "Marshawn Lynch: A History". Lynch-A-History.com. Archived from the original on August 16, 2024. Retrieved October 30, 2025.
  15. ↑ Olsen, Lance (December 12, 2003) [Spring 1989]. "The Next Generation In Fiction". Virginia Quarterly Review (VQROnline.org. 65 (2). Archived from the original on March 30, 2023. Retrieved October 30, 2025.
  16. ↑ Barton, Tyler & Mountford, Peter (October 12, 2015). "Learning How To Reading: 'I Was Half Afraid She Was Going to Jump Out the Window.'—Chapter 16: An Interview with Peter Mountford". Atticus Review (atticusreview.org). Retrieved October 31, 2025. So when we had David Shields talking about collage, we had to tell all of our writing students: if you are writing a memoir and are overwhelmed by the chronology, and want to break apart the story and tell it out of order, then come hear how it's done from this guy, who is a pioneer of collage writing.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  17. ↑ Scott, A.O. (February 5, 1996). "Close-Up of a Writer Far Removed" (book review, Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity). Newsday . p. 50. Retrieved October 31, 2025. 'Remote,' Shields new book, is a nonfiction successor [to Handbook for Drowning (1992), the latter], an experimental collage intended as a pointillist self-portrait as well as a reflection on contemporary American life as a whole.
  18. ↑ Scott, A.O. (November 7, 1999). "Hoop Daydreams" (book review, Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season). Newsday . p. 70. Retrieved October 31, 2025.
  19. ↑ Sante, Luc (March 12, 2010). "The Fiction of Memory". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved July 11, 2020.
  20. ↑ Wood, James. "Keeping It Real". The New Yorker. Retrieved July 11, 2020.
  21. ↑ Jamison, Leslie (March 16, 2015). "The Memoir in the Age of Oversharing". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 11, 2020.
  22. ↑ Hsu, Hua. "The Profound Silence of Marshawn Lynch". The New Yorker. Retrieved July 11, 2020.
  23. ↑ "David Shields". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved December 6, 2025.
  24. ↑ "LitHub | 100 Books That Defined the Decade". LitHub. December 28, 2019. Retrieved October 2, 2022.
  25. ↑ Artist Trust Staff (October 30, 2025). "Grantees—David Shields / County: King County". Artist Trust (ArtistTrust.org). Seattle, WA: Artist Trust. Retrieved October 30, 2025. Awards / Grants for Artist Projects 2007... / Fellowship Awards 2003... / Arts Innovator Award 2013... / James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award 2015... .
  26. ↑ NEA Staff (October 30, 2025). "Grants/Recent Grants/Literature Fellowships—David Shields (search)" (grantee database search result). NEA (Arts.gov). Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Retrieved October 30, 2025. David Shields—1991—Creative Writing / David Shields—1982—Creative Writing.


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