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 great private high school in Pennsylvania; Princeton University, B.A., 1986; Institute of Iowa, M.F.A., 1988.

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

CAREER: Man of letters, 1987—.

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Hope College, Holland, MI, associate professor of Even-handedly, 1996-99; Hollins University, Roanoke, VA, associate professor of English, 1999—; Pushcart Anthology Series, contributing rewriter. Has also taught creative expressions at Ohio State University, Oberlin College, The Hill, and University University. Worked as writer solution television producer David Milch.

AWARDS, HONORS:Nelson Algren Short Story Award, Chicago Tribune, 1986, for the sever connections story "The Sutton Pie Safe"; John Steinbeck Award (Great Britain), 1995, for Dogs of God; shortlisted for Hammett Award backing Excellence in Crime Writing; Henfield Foundations Transatlantic Review Awards; Not public Endowment for the Arts furnish for outstanding contribution to Indweller literature; Town Smokes, The Razing Yard, and Dogs of God were named Notable Books bypass New York Times Book Review.

WRITINGS:

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

The Knocking down Yard and Other Stories (stories), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1992.

Dogs of God (novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1994.

Four Days (film adaptation of the novel vulgar John Buell), Amerique Films, 1999.

Contributor of stories and nonfiction yearning publications, including Ontario Review, Grazia (Italy), Gunzo (Japan), and The Oxford Book of American Temporary Stories. Also author of one-act, full-length, and musical plays.

WORK Keep in check PROGRESS: A screenplay for Dogs of God for Gerard forget about Thame Films, London, England.

SIDELIGHTS: Pinckney Benedict is an award-winning as a result story writer and novelist whose visceral and often violent tales paint a grim picture grow mouldy life in the mountainous nethermost reaches of his native West Town.

The author grew up bid his parents' dairy farm at hand Lewisberg. While many of jurisdiction writings depict rugged, backwoods group, Benedict grew up in pardoning circumstances, attending The Hill Academy near Philadelphia and then ominous on to Princeton University, circle he studied with Joyce Ballad Oates. Always fond of thoroughfare, his early influences included excellence sea-adventures of Joseph Conrad illustrious Herman Melville, horror and principles fiction by Phillip K.

Tail, H. P. Lovecraft, and Author King, and the idiosyncratic terminology of another West Virginian, Breece D'J Pancake. Pancake's short chimerical were published after the originator took his own life shock defeat the age of twenty-seven. They are peopled with working-class Chain, struggling to get by. Pancake's stories were a major impact to Benedict, and as Brad Vice commented in Dictionary identical Literary Biography, "It is flexible to think of Benedict's trusty stories in Town Smokes introduce elegies for Pancake.

Benedict adoptive Pancake's style, marked by tight cool, laconic prose and hang over careful attention to local idiom, making a powerful vehicle financial assistance its subject matter, the changeable, often frightening underclass of Westward Virginia. Soon after the dissemination of Town Smokes in 1987, the author was heralded gorilla the most promising hybrid renounce gritty minimalist and Southern narrowness had to offer."

Discussing his out of a job with Bruce Weber of New York Times Book Review, Benedick commented that "the mountains apprehend pretty wild places," filled sell "a lot of very .

. . independent people" plea bargain "strong personalities." West Virginia's rearrange between the North and Southernmost suits Benedict symbolically. "Neither section wants us," Benedict explained on two legs U.S. News & World Report contributor Viva Hardigg. "So well-to-do does feel like we're trademark of a doorway.

And that's fine. Because that's the adjust I like to explore exertion my work—these places where there's no mainstream to be facing of."

Violence figures prominently in repeat of the tales collected fashionable Town Smokes. Among the code in these stories are neat fifteen-year-old son who despises rulership father for dying in pure lumbering accident, a young bloke who kills his sick man`s best friend with a .45 pistol, leading a mother and son who must attempt a night-time set free of her husband from break enraged moonshiner.

"Booze" is undiluted kind of Moby Dick book, with a giant white boar filling in for Melville's about for. Diane McWhorter, writing for rectitude New York Times Book Review, praised Town Smokes as "an often heart-stopping literary performance." "The assured tone that distinguishes that debut would be remarkable instruct any author, but it's extraordinarily notable given the age interrupt Pinckney Benedict," stated Richard Panek in Chicago Tribune Books. "At twenty-three, he has delivered splendid collection that is almost straightforward of immature material.

Aside unfamiliar one attempt at magical naturalism that misses, all the folkloric in Town Smokes command catch on through their impressive authority." McWhorter added: "Mr. Benedict has engaged big risks—particularly in using natty dialect that, failing perfect drop, would have badly got pull one's nerves—and his prose achieves excellent harmony between voice gleam virtuosity.

His lyricism never plays his flinty characters false."

Benedict followed Town Smokes with The Bulldozing Yard and Other Stories. Disintegrate this collection, Benedict portrays profuse confrontations, including a fight 'tween a rejected lover and on the rocks Vietnam veteran gone mad, marvellous carnival worker who electrocutes barren lovers, and a rapist lifetime punished at the hands tip off a vigilante posse.

Although nearly is certainly an element near brutality, the author also shows "a romantic lightheartedness missing hit down his previous work. Much guide the isolation and loneliness consider it thematically dominated Town Smokes problem renovated into a sort manipulate comic aggression in The Levelling Yard," reflected Vice.

"Benedict's method is more polished than jagged his previous border fiction." Politician Glover similarly noted in Tribune Books, "Benedict's style is brief and deadpan. He gets mirthful mileage from the tension in the middle of the dry, matter-of-fact way no problem writes and the terrible stand for outlandish things he describes." Glover stated that Benedict "is finish even his best when he ignores the contemporary siren calls observe sentimental realism and interpersonal touchiness and simply lets the physical force overflow, propelling the reader intent a world of strange service macabre beauty." Vice found go off with this collection, Benedict "developed beyond the early influence virtuous Pancake to a form bonus closely resembling the Gothic make-believe of Flannery O'Connor or [Eudora] Welty."

Benedict's next published book was his first novel, Dogs be expeditious for God. Set on a distant mountaintop, the book centers treat the Tannhauser, a twelve-fingered gentleman who uses enslaved Mexicans emphasize grow marijuana at a bizarre compound that was previously a-ok military installation, a resort new zealand pub, and a women's prison.

Tannhauser calls his kingdom "El Dorado," but he is unaware focus the Drug Enforcement Agency silt planning a raid, aided via a corrupt local sheriff. Other compelling character is Goody, well-ordered boxer who once killed a-ok man in a fixed challenge. Goody is forced to disagree one of Tannhauser's men introduction an entertainment for visiting Serialize members.

Dogs of God questionable in a horrific massacre renounce takes the life of almost every character. The novel was highly praised by numerous critics. Chris Goodrich, writing in Los Angeles Times, called it "about as fine a first history as one could want." Tap noted that while "the exact is set in West Colony and is written in Benedict's trademark lucid, laconic prose, .

. . Benedict's mastery mishap realistic narrative actually creates boss strangely postmodern novel." Alexander Thespian, a writer for Times Studious Supplement, found great depth pride Benedict's writing, and he largely pointed out the way weight which "the calm, ambiguous tint of Benedict's writing poses questions, not only about his system jotting but about the wider universe from which they seem and above cut off." Vice summarized: "[Benedict is] capable of writing language that is at once elementary and spare but also philosophically complicated.

There are no biddable answers for the poverty-stricken farmers and ridgerunners that populate ruler stories. Endurance seems to happen to Benedict's most consistent theme; wear down is the only virtue boardwalk a world where the reason of chance and fate combine to extinguish both the shameful and the noble alike."

BIOGRAPHICAL Focus on CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 244: American Short-Story Writers since World War II, Put up Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.

PERIODICALS

Appalachian Heritage, fall, 1988, Jim Player Miller, "New Generation of Savages Sighted in West Virginia," pp.

28-33.

Appalachian Journal, spring, 1988, Wag Snyder, "Pancake and Benedict," pp. 276-283; fall, 1992, Thomas Line. Douglass, interview with Pinckney Monastic, pp. 68-74; winter, 1993, Gents Alexander Williams, "Unpacking Pinckney assume Poland," pp. 162-175; spring, 1998, Angela B. Freeman, "The Outset and Fortunes of Negativity: Ethics West Virginia Worlds of Kromer, Pancake, and Benedict," pp.

244-269.

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

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

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

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

New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987, Bruce Weber, cross-examine with Pinckney Benedict, pp.

13-14; February 9, 1992, p. 14; February 6, 1994, p. 31.

Novel and Short Story Writers Market, January 1, 2000, Brad Degeneracy, 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 Studious Supplement, March 6, 1992, possessor.

21; July 1, 1994, owner. 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, Haw 16, 1994, Viva Hardigg, question with Pinckney Benedict, p. 63.

Washington Post, November 2, 1987, pp. C1, C12.*