The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism is awarded for literary criticism by the University of Iowa on behalf of the Truman Capote Literary Trust. The value of the award is $30,000 (USD), and is said to be the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language. [1] The formal name of the prize is the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, commemorating both Capote and his friend Newton Arvin, who was a distinguished critic and Smith College professor until he lost his job in 1960 after his homosexuality was publicly exposed. [2]
Truman Garcia Capote was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a "non-fiction novel." His works have been adapted into more than 20 films and television dramas.
Gish Jen is a contemporary American writer and speaker.
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
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.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a celebrated graduate-level creative writing program in the United States. The writer Lan Samantha Chang is its director. Graduates earn a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Creative Writing. It has been cited as the best graduate writing program in the nation, counting among its alumni 17 Pulitzer Prize winners.
Sir Geoffrey William Hill, FRSL was an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation and was called the "greatest living poet in the English language." From 2010 to 2015 he held the position of Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Following his receiving the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2009 for his Collected Critical Writings, and the publication of Broken Hierarchies , Hill is recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry and criticism in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers".
Fredrick Newton Arvin was an American literary critic and academic. He achieved national recognition for his studies of individual nineteenth-century American authors.
Elaine Scarry is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain, and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law. She was formerly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
Susan Stewart is an American poet and literary critic. She is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University.
Allen Wier, was an American writer and a professor. He was the Watkins Endowed Visiting Writer at Murray State University from 2016 until 2020; he is Professor Emeritus having taught at the University of Tennessee from 1994 until 2015, and the University of Alabama from 1980 to 1994. and Hollins College from 1975 to 1980 and Carnegie-Mellon University from 1974 to 1975. He taught in the University of New Orleans summer writing workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland in Summer of 2013. He was visiting writer at the University of Texas in 1983 and at Florida International University 1984-1985.
Dame Gillian Patricia Kempster Beer, is a British literary critic and academic. She was President of Clare Hall from 1994 to 2001, and King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2002.
The Iowa Review is an American literary magazine that publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews.
Mark McGurl is an American literary critic specializing in 20th-century American literature. He is the Albert L. Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University.
Seth Lerer is an American scholar who specializes in historical analyses of the English language, in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is a Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. He previously held the Avalon Foundation Professorship in Humanities at Stanford University. Lerer won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Children’s Literature: A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter.
Helen Small is Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. She was previously a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.
"A Diamond Guitar" is a short story by Truman Capote, first published in Harper's Bazaar in 1950; it is noted as one of his better quality early short stories. The title refers to the prize possession of the younger man, a rhinestone-studded guitar; the guitar serves as the key image of the story.
Nina Baym (1936–2018) was an American literary critic and literary historian. She was professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1963 to 2004.
The Truman Capote Literary Trust is an American charitable trust established in 1994 by Truman Capote's literary executor, Alan U. Schwartz, pursuant to Capote's will.
Philip Fisher is the Felice Crowl Reid Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University and an author.