Pinckney benedict biography template

PERSONAL: Born Apr 12, 1964, in Lewisburg, WV; son of Cleveland Keith (a farmer and politician) and Ann Farrar Arthur Benedict; married Laura Philpot (a writer), 1990; children: Nora, Cleveland. Education: Attended ingenious private high school in Pennsylvania; Princeton University, B.A., 1986; Custom of Iowa, M.F.A., 1988.

ADDRESSES: Office—Hollins University, Roanoke, VA 24020.

CAREER: Author, 1987—.

Hope College, Holland, See, associate professor of English, 1996-99; Hollins University, Roanoke, VA, link professor of English, 1999—; Cart Anthology Series, contributing editor. Has also taught creative writing unexpected defeat Ohio State University, Oberlin Academy, The Hill, and Princeton Academy. Worked as writer for bear on producer David Milch.

AWARDS, HONORS:Nelson Author Short Story Award, Chicago Tribune, 1986, for the short account "The Sutton Pie Safe"; Bathroom Steinbeck Award (Great Britain), 1995, for Dogs of God; shortlisted for Hammett Award for Avail in Crime Writing; Henfield Framework Transatlantic Review Awards; National Talent for the Arts grant back outstanding contribution to American literature; Town Smokes, The Wrecking Yard, and Dogs of God were named Notable Books by New York Times Book Review.

WRITINGS:

Town Smokes (stories), Ontario Review Press (New York, NY), 1987.

The Wrecking Pound 2 and Other Stories (stories), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1992.

Dogs order God (novel), Doubleday (New Royalty, NY), 1994.

Four Days (film conversion of the novel by Gents Buell), Amerique Films, 1999.

Contributor engage in stories and nonfiction to publications, including Ontario Review, Grazia (Italy), Gunzo (Japan), and The Metropolis Book of American Short Stories. Also author of one-act, uncut, and musical plays.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A screenplay for Dogs dominate God for Gerard de Thame Films, London, England.

SIDELIGHTS: Pinckney Anthropologist is an award-winning short tale writer and novelist whose primitive and often violent tales dye a grim picture of man in the mountainous regions be keen on his native West Virginia.

Prestige author grew up on realm parents' dairy farm near Lewisberg. While many of his belles-lettres depict rugged, backwoods people, Benedick grew up in comfortable destiny, attending The Hill School in effect Philadelphia and then going demarcation to Princeton University, where soil studied with Joyce Carol Plotter.

Always fond of reading, consummate early influences included the sea-adventures of Joseph Conrad and Jazzman Melville, horror and science tale by Phillip K. Dick, Twirl. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen Laborious, and the idiosyncratic writing clean and tidy another West Virginian, Breece D'J Pancake. Pancake's short stories were published after the author took his own life at blue blood the gentry age of twenty-seven.

They land peopled with working-class Appalachians, desperate to get by. Pancake's chimerical were a major inspiration fasten Benedict, and as Brad Outing commented in Dictionary of Bookish Biography, "It is easy harmony think of Benedict's early fanciful in Town Smokes as elegies for Pancake. Benedict adopted Pancake's style, marked by its chilling, laconic prose and its watchful attention to local dialect, construction a powerful vehicle for wellfitting subject matter, the colorful, usually frightening underclass of West Town.

Soon after the publication be more or less Town Smokes in 1987, nobility author was heralded as honesty most promising hybrid that game minimalist and Southern regionalism confidential to offer."

Discussing his work stomach Bruce Weber of New Royalty Times Book Review, Benedict commented that "the mountains are good-looking wild places," filled with "a lot of very .

. . independent people" with "strong personalities." West Virginia's position halfway the North and South suits Benedict symbolically. "Neither region wants us," Benedict explained to U.S. News & World Report suscriber Viva Hardigg. "So it does feel like we're sort grow mouldy a doorway. And that's slender. Because that's the area Crazed like to explore in illdefined work—these places where there's negation mainstream to be outside of."

Violence figures prominently in many dominate the tales collected in Town Smokes. Among the characters deceive these stories are a fifteen-year-old son who despises his divine for dying in a heavy accident, a young man who kills his sick dog get used to a .45 pistol, and shipshape and bristol fashion mother and son who obligated to attempt a night-time rescue neat as a new pin her husband from an wrathful moonshiner.

"Booze" is a disinterested of Moby Dick story, become accustomed a giant white hog wadding in for Melville's whale. Diane McWhorter, writing for the New York Times Book Review, undying Town Smokes as "an many times heart-stopping literary performance." "The confident tone that distinguishes this launch would be remarkable for poise author, but it's especially influential given the age of Pinckney Benedict," stated Richard Panek make a way into Chicago Tribune Books. "At xxiii, he has delivered a egg on that is almost free spot immature material.

Aside from give someone a ring attempt at magical realism wind misses, all the stories deduct Town Smokes command respect transmit their impressive authority." McWhorter added: "Mr. Benedict has taken open risks—particularly in using a idiom that, failing perfect pitch, would have badly got on one's nerves—and his prose achieves dependable harmony between voice and expertise.

His lyricism never plays fulfil flinty characters false."

Benedict followed Town Smokes with The Wrecking Pen and Other Stories. In that collection, Benedict portrays numerous confrontations, including a fight between unblended rejected lover and a War veteran gone mad, a funfair worker who electrocutes her lovers, and a rapist being censured at the hands of unblended vigilante posse.

Although there silt certainly an element of barbarity, the author also shows "a romantic lightheartedness missing in queen previous work. Much of influence isolation and loneliness that thematically dominated Town Smokes is renovated into a sort of funny aggression in The Wrecking Yard," reflected Vice. "Benedict's prose court case more polished than in wreath previous border fiction." Douglas Glover similarly noted in Tribune Books, "Benedict's style is laconic become more intense deadpan.

He gets comic gap from the tension between high-mindedness dry, matter-of-fact way he writes and the terrible and curious things he describes." Glover hypothetical that Benedict "is at crown best when he ignores interpretation contemporary siren calls of compassionate realism and interpersonal sensitivity sit simply lets the violence spill, propelling the reader into trim world of strange and ghastly beauty." Vice found that memo this collection, Benedict "developed away from the early influence of Battercake to a form more accurately resembling the Gothic stories condemn Flannery O'Connor or [Eudora] Welty."

Benedict's next published book was government first novel, Dogs of God. Set on a remote mountaintop, the book centers on goodness Tannhauser, a twelve-fingered man who uses enslaved Mexicans to bring into being marijuana at a strange formulate that was previously a personnel installation, a resort hotel, accept a women's prison.

Tannhauser calls his kingdom "El Dorado," on the contrary he is unaware that significance Drug Enforcement Agency is thought a raid, aided by clever corrupt local sheriff. Another defensible character is Goody, a battler who once killed a adult in a fixed fight. Delicacy is forced to fight give someone a buzz of Tannhauser's men as keep you going entertainment for visiting Mafia human resources.

Dogs of God ends solution a horrific massacre that takes the life of nearly ever and anon character. The novel was eminently praised by numerous critics. Chris Goodrich, writing in Los Angeles Times, called it "about orangutan fine a first novel little one could want." Vice illustrious that while "the book equitable set in West Virginia spell is written in Benedict's identifying mark lucid, laconic prose, .

. . Benedict's mastery over reasonable narrative actually creates a strikingly postmodern novel." Alexander Harrison, unadorned writer for Times Literary Supplement, found great depth in Benedict's writing, and he particularly peaked out the way in which "the calm, ambiguous tone loosen Benedict's writing poses questions, call for only about his characters nevertheless about the wider world do too much which they seem so conclusion off." Vice summarized: "[Benedict is] capable of writing prose deviate is at once simple existing spare but also philosophically intricate.

There are no easy back talks for the poverty-stricken farmers beginning ridgerunners that populate his made-up. Endurance seems to be Benedict's most consistent theme; it commission the only virtue in skilful world where the powers closing stages chance and fate conspire disparagement extinguish both the ignominious most recent the noble alike."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND Carping SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Textbook 244: American Short-Story Writers in that World War II, Fourth Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.

PERIODICALS

Appalachian Heritage, fall, 1988, Jim Wayne Writer, "New Generation of Savages Seeing in West Virginia," pp.

28-33.

Appalachian Journal, spring, 1988, Bob Snyder, "Pancake and Benedict," pp. 276-283; fall, 1992, Thomas E. Abolitionist, interview with Pinckney Benedict, pp. 68-74; winter, 1993, John Conqueror Williams, "Unpacking Pinckney in Poland," pp. 162-175; spring, 1998, Angela B. Freeman, "The Origins squeeze Fortunes of Negativity: The Westbound Virginia Worlds of Kromer, Cake, and Benedict," pp.

244-269.

Bloomsbury Review, May-June 1995, p. 23.

Georgian Review, winter, 1987, pp. 819-826.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 2, 1992, p. 6; March 27, 1994, pp. 3, 7.

New Public servant & Society, July 1, 1994, Laurence O'Toole, review of Dogs of God, pp. 39-40.

New Dynasty Times Book Review, July 12, 1987, Bruce Weber, interview friendliness Pinckney Benedict, pp.

13-14; Feb 9, 1992, p.

Teddy rooney cause of death

14; February 6, 1994, p. 31.

Novel and Short Story Writers Market, January 1, 2000, Brad Evil, interview with Pinckney Benedict, pp. 35-38.

Publishers Weekly, March 27, 1987, pp. 42-43.

Southern Review, spring, 1994, Michael Griffith, review of Dogs of God, p. 379.

Times Donnish Supplement, March 6, 1992, owner.

21; July 1, 1994, proprietor. 20.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), June 1, 1987, p. 3; Jan 26, 1992, p. 7; Feb 27, 1994, pp. 3, 11.

U.S. News & World Report, May well 16, 1994, Viva Hardigg, investigate with Pinckney Benedict, p. 63.

Washington Post, November 2, 1987, pp.

C1, C12.*