Dow Mossman

Last updated

Dow Mossman (born 1943 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa) is an American writer, known for his novel The Stones of Summer .

Contents

Life and career

Dow Mossman studied at Coe College for two years, finished college at the University of Iowa and received his Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1969.

His novel The Stones of Summer was published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1972 and Popular Library a year later. Following the publication of the novel, Mossman was mentally exhausted and spent several months in an Iowa sanitorium. The novel soon went out of print. One element of the novel is poems and letters from Vietnam sent by Marine officer Dan Guenther (U.of Iowa, MFA, 1973), who later published the novels China Wind (Ivy, 1990) and Dodge City Blues (Redburn Press, 2007).

Stone Reader

In 2002, Mossman was the subject of the documentary film Stone Reader by Mark Moskowitz, [1] [2] [3] which chronicled the director's attempt to resuscitate the acclaimed book and speak to its seemingly vanished author.

The film shows Mossman currently living in the home he grew up in, which is filled with books. According to the film, Mossman writes on the porch, and is currently working on a book based on notes he has taken from watching hundreds of old movies. In addition to that book, he is also working on a book of poetry.

Prior to Stone Reader, Mossman had been employed for 19 years as a welder, before quitting his job to look after his aging mother until her death, after which he returned to work as a paper bundler for the local newspaper. After the film's release, The Stones of Summer was re-published by Barnes & Noble. He is now semi-retired.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Kesey</span> American writer and countercultural figure

Ken Elton Kesey was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony Burgess</span> English writer and composer (1917–1993)

John Anthony Burgess Wilson,, who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer and composer.

Barry Hannah was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi. Hannah was born in Meridian, Mississippi, on April 23, 1942, and grew up in Clinton, Mississippi. He wrote eight novels and five short story collections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Green</span> English novelist (1905–1973)

Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke, an English writer best remembered for the novels Party Going, Living and Loving. He published a total of nine novels between 1926 and 1952.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William H. Gass</span> American fiction writer, critic, philosophy professor

William Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terry Southern</span> American writer

Terry Southern was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style. Part of the Paris postwar literary movement in the 1950s and a companion to Beat writers in Greenwich Village, Southern was also at the center of Swinging London in the 1960s and helped to change the style and substance of American films in the 1970s. He briefly wrote for Saturday Night Live in the 1980s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Lethem</span> American novelist, essayist, short story writer

Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.

William Trevor Cox, known by his pen name William Trevor, was an Irish novelist, playwright, and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.

<i>Across the River and into the Trees</i> 1950 novel by Ernest Hemingway

Across the River and Into the Trees is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1950, after first being serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine earlier that year. The title is derived from the last words of U.S. Civil War Confederate General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Matthiessen</span> American novelist

Peter Matthiessen was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, and zen teacher. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he was the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction and fiction. He was also a prominent environmental activist.

<i>The Stones of Summer</i>

The Stones of Summer is a novel by American writer Dow Mossman. Both the novel and Mossman are also subjects of Mark Moskowitz's Slamdance award-winning film, Stone Reader.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Derek Marlowe</span> English author, playwright, screenwriter (1938–1996)

Derek William Mario Marlowe was an English playwright, novelist, screenwriter and painter.

Robert Girardi is an American author of mystery fiction and detective stories.

James Galvin is the author of seven volumes of poetry, and two novels. He teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chelsea Cain</span> American journalist and writer

Chelsea Snow Cain is an American writer of novels and columns.

Dan Guenther, is an American novelist and poet. A graduate of Coe College, he has a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He was a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. His poems and letters from Vietnam, during the Vietnam War, were included in the acclaimed novel, The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman, published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1972 and republished by Barnes & Noble in 2003. In 2002, Guenther appeared in the documentary film Stone Reader by Mark Moskowitz. The film chronicled the director's attempt to revive and have republished the acclaimed book of seemingly vanished author Dow Mossman, a lifelong friend of Dan Guenther. The revival was successful.

Janet Burroway is an American author. Burroway's published oeuvre includes eight novels, memoirs, short stories, poems, translations, plays, two children's books, and two how-to books about the craft of writing. Her novel The Buzzards was nominated for the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. Raw Silk is her most acclaimed novel thus far. While Burroway's literary fame is due to her novels, the book that has won her the widest readership is Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, first published in 1982. Now in its 10th edition, the book is used as a textbook in writing programs throughout the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samuel R. Delany</span> American author, critic, and academic

Samuel R. "Chip" Delany, is an American author and literary critic. His work includes fiction, memoir, criticism, and essays. His fiction includes Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, Dhalgren, the Return to Nevèrÿon series, and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His nonfiction includes Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, About Writing, and eight books of essays. After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo Awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002.

George P. Elliott was an American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nic Stone</span> American writer

Andrea Nicole Livingstone, known as Nic Stone, is an American author of young adult fiction and middle grade fiction, best known for her debut novel Dear Martin and her middle grade debut, Clean Getaway. Her novels have been translated into six languages.

References

  1. Twemlow, Nick (November 1, 2003). "The Stones of Summer Rolls Back". Poets & Writers (November/December 2003).
  2. ( ISBN   156730334X)
  3. Stone Reader (IMDB)

External sources