William gay author
Behind and below them the church loomed, a pale outraged shape, no more, and only the impotent dead kept its watch.
—William Gay, Twilight
The lines stretch and sag across a tired man's cheekbones. I see his gait, a careful and sluggish kind of walk akin to the drawl of his speech. Underneath is the genius of an artist, a man so humbling with his talents that he's been whispered among giants — Faulkner, McCarty, O'Connor.
He talks and I'm reminded of a distant Summer storm, a rumble that softly peaks and dips. On surface to some, he would seem simple, just a hardworking, blue collar bloke embracing the slow, molasses way of the South.
But I know better, because the truth of William Gay's art speaks so much louder than these surface perceptions.
It's been more than two months since his passin
A World Almost Rotten: The Fiction Of William Gay
The excellent Southern novelist and story writer William Gay died at his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee, on February 23rd of this year, at the age of An intensely confidential man who treasured his reclusion and had no interest in the sometimes shameless self-promotion required by authors, Homosexual spoke at excellent length and on numerous occasions with William Giraldi in in preparation for Giraldi&#;s essay &#;A World Almost Rotten: The Fiction of William Gay,&#; the only in-depth critical analysis of Gay&#;s novels and stories. We offer Giraldi&#;s essay for the legion of Gay&#;s heartbroken fans, and for those privileged ones who are about to uncover for the first time this significant voice in American fiction.
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In William Gay’s scorched world Flannery O’Connor is show less like a looming ghoul than an elderly aunt who lives in his house and will not cease . And yet despite O’Connor’s strong presence (and the unavoidable presence of the Yahweh of Southern literature, the god from whom no male writer in the South can ever hope to flee) Gay’
These are some well-known facts in William Gay’s official biography: that he lived in a cabin in the woods, that he didn’t use email, that he worked in construction his whole life until someone finally noticed he was a great journalist. But these facts tell only part of the story.
For readers and writers, at least, the fuller story depends upon an eternal question: is a author born, or is he made? William Gay was born a writer. As a late-life literary success who didn’t attend creative-writing programs or pay for professional workshops, Gay symbolized the hopes of struggling writers, especially rural ones. He was good, and he found a way to let the world know he was good—those are facts we cling to as evidence of what is possible. Throughout history, people have made long pilgrimages to witness lesser miracles.
William Gay’s death last week of heart failure sent tremors through the community of writers and readers in Tennessee and beyond, people who loved him as a friend and as a scribe. We have asked some of those who knew Gay, in ways large and small, to send us their stories. Th
February 24, Novelist William Gay died at his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee, last night, at age sixty-eight. Among the most critically acclaimed of his generation of Southern writers, Gay began his universal writing career famously after time, when, at age fifty-five, his first short story was published in The Georgia Review. His first novel, The Long Home, won the James A. Michener Memorial Prize and was named a New York Times Notable Guide for He followed that success with another novel, Provinces of Night, a short-story collection, I Detest to See That Evening Sun Go Down, and a third novel, Twilight.
Gay was frequently named by critics as the organic heir of Southern writers famed for mining specific locales; he was most often compared to Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner. Gay acknowledged the power of McCarthy, in particular, on his writing, and of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County on Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee, the setting for all or part of each of his books. Gay was also a well-known music lover and frequently wrote about harmony for magazines and anthologie