Larry Watson | |
---|---|
Born | 1947 (age 75–76) Rugby, North Dakota, U.S. |
Occupation | Author |
Alma mater | Bismarck State College, University of North Dakota, University of Utah |
Notable works | Montana 1948 |
Notable awards | Milkweed National Fiction Prize (1993) |
Larry Watson (born 1947) is an American author of novels, poetry and short stories.
He was born in 1947 in Rugby, North Dakota. He grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota. He graduated from Bismarck State College, [1] then earned both bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of North Dakota. He subsequently earned a Doctorate in creative writing from the University of Utah. [2] [3]
His short story "Where I Go, What I Do" was included in the anthology The Best American Short Stories in 1978. His first novel, In a Dark Time, was published in 1980. The book did not sell well, delaying Watson's plans for a second novel. But Montana 1948, published in 1993, was a success, winning the Milkweed National Fiction Prize that year [4] and going on to sell more than half a million copies. [5] The Washington Post called Montana 1948 "a significant and elegant addition to the fiction of the American West, and to contemporary American fiction in general." The book follows the story of a Montana family and involves the sexual assault and murder of a Native American woman. The book has been taught frequently in high schools, but its subject matter has been the subject of controversy. In 2020, Henry Sibley High School in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, announced that it would stop teaching the novel temporarily until fuller cultural context of the book's setting could be taught as well. [6]
His subsequent novels include Orchard, Laura, Justice, and White Crosses. [7] Esquire magazine called his 2011 novel American Boy one of the best books of that year. [5]
Watson's 2013 novel 'Let Him Go', has been made into a film, directed by Thomas Bezucha, and starring Kevin Costner, Diane Lane and Lesley Manville. Filmed in Calgary in 2019, it was released by Focus Features in November 2020. [8]
Watson taught writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point for 25 years before joining the faculty at Marquette University in 2003 as a visiting professor. [3]
William Larry Brown was an American novelist, non-fiction and short story writer. He won numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, and Mississippi's Governor's Award For Excellence in the Arts. He was also the first two-time winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction.
Ivan Doig was an American author and novelist, widely known for his sixteen fiction and non-fiction books set mostly in his native Montana, celebrating the landscape and people of the post-war American West.
Raymond Federman was a French–American novelist and academic, known also for poetry, essays, translations, and criticism. He held positions at the University at Buffalo from 1973 to 1999, when he was appointed Distinguished Emeritus Professor. Federman was a writer in the experimental style, one that sought to deconstruct traditional prose. This type of writing is quite prevalent in his book Double or Nothing, in which the linear narrative of the story has been broken down and restructured so as to be nearly incoherent. Words are also often arranged on pages to resemble images or to suggest repetitious themes.
Larry Alfred Woiwode was an American writer from North Dakota, where he was the state's Poet Laureate from 1995 until his death. His work appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Gentleman's Quarterly, The Partisan Review and The Paris Review. He was the author of five novels; two collections of short stories; a commentary titled "Acts"; a biography of the Gold Seal founder and entrepreneur, Harold Schafer, Aristocrat of the West; a book of poetry, Even Tide; and reviews and essays and essay-reviews that appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post Book World. He received North Dakota's highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award, in 1992.
Janet Peery is an American short story writer and novelist.
John Dunning was an American writer of non-fiction and detective fiction. He was known for his reference books on old-time radio and his series of mysteries featuring Denver bookseller and ex-policeman Cliff Janeway.
Milkweed is a 2003 young adult historical fiction novel by American author Jerry Spinelli. The book is about a boy in Warsaw, Poland in the years of World War II during the Holocaust. Over time he is taken in by a Jewish group of orphans and he must avoid the Nazis while living on the streets with other orphans. The story narrator is the boy in the future living in America recalling his past experiences. Despite being a historical fiction novel, Doctor Korczak, a minor character in the story is based on a real person named Janusz Korczak.
Marcus Henry Kellogg was a newspaper reporter killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Kellogg rode with George Armstrong Custer during the battle. His dispatches were the only press coverage of Custer and his men in the days leading up to the battle. As a newspaper stringer whose reports were picked up around the country, Kellogg is considered the first Associated Press correspondent to die in the line of duty.
Montana 1948 is a 1993 novella by Larry Watson. The novella focuses on the life of young Montanan David Hayden, his family and the fictional town of Bentrock, Montana, and focuses on the struggles of a family torn between loyalty and justice. It was awarded the Milkweed National Fiction Prize.
Tayari Jones is an American author and academic known for An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, and recently returned to her hometown of Atlanta after a decade in New York City. Jones was Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University before becoming Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
Deni Ellis Béchard, also known as Deni Yvan Béchard is a Canadian-American novelist.
Mary Rose O'Reilley is an American poet, novelist and writer of non-fiction.
Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, memoirist, translator and fiction writer. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of numerous books, notably Building Fiction, The Museum of Happiness, Space and Underground Women.
Melanie Sumner is an American writer and college professor. She was acclaimed as one of "America's Best Young Novelists" in 1995. Writer Jill McCorkle says, "She comes to her characters with this wealth of knowledge. She's so well-versed in those wonderful little details that make up Southern towns. She has such a rich expanse of her fictional turf wildly varied and yet always occupied with this kind of social manners and morals and taboos."
Jill Collins McCorkle is an American short story writer and novelist.
Mary Louise Defender Wilson, also known by her Dakotah name Wagmuhawin, is a storyteller, traditionalist, historian, scholar and educator of the Dakotah/Hidatsa people and a former director working in health care organizations. Her cultural work has been recognized with a National Heritage Fellowship in 1999 and a United States Artists fellowship in 2015, among many other honors.
Dan Louie Flores is an American writer and historian who specializes in cultural and environmental studies of the American West. He held the A.B. Hammond Chair in Western History at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana until he retired in May 2014.
Carrie Brown is an American novelist. She is the author of seven novels and a collection of short stories. Her most recent novel, The Stargazer's Sister, was published by Pantheon Books in January 2016.
Laura Pritchett is an American writer. Pritchett is the author of five literary novels and one book of nonfiction. Her work is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by her native Colorado. Both her fiction and nonfiction often focus on issues of ecology, conservation, climate change, and social justice issues. She has been awarded the PEN USA Award for Fiction, the High Plains Literary Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the WILLA Fiction Award, and others. She is the editor of three anthologies, all on environmental topics, and writes regularly for magazines.
Miriam Karmel is an American writer. Her first novel, Being Esther (2013), is one of only a few involving characters in their eighties.