Joy williams author biography books

Joy Williams Biography

Joy Williams is the author of four novels – the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 – and three collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honours are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.

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An acclaimed fiction writer and essayist, Joy Williams is the author of four novels and five short-story collections. Williams’s short stories are widely anthologized; her first novel, State of Grace (1973), was nominated for the National Book Award; her 2000 novel, The Quick and the Dead, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and her 2001 essay collection, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

From the beginning, Williams was recognized as a major writer by literary giants like Harold Brodkey, James Salter, William Gass, and Raymond Carver. In 1973, Truman Capote called State of Grace “the best novel of the year.” Williams’s first stories were published in The New Yorker, Esquire, and the Paris Review, and, during the late 70s, George Plimpton said Williams “towers over most contemporary fiction.” In 2000, Plimpton declared Joy Williams was “without question one of the masters of the contemporary short story.”

In 2015, Knopf published The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories, and it served as the occasion for Williams’s contemporaries to express their admiration. Don DeLillo wrote, “Joy Williams is an essential American voice, giving us a new way to hear the living language of our time, the off-notes, the devious humor—as the strange, fierce, vigorous undercurrent we sometimes mistake for ordinary.”

The Visiting Privilege also drew comparably emphatic praise from a younger generation of writers raised on her work. Ben Marcus, reviewing for The New York Times, wrote that Williams inspires “the sort of helpless laughter that erupts when a profound moral project is conducted with such blinding literary craft, when the dilemmas most difficult to accept are turned into dramatic action.” Karen Russell said of Williams, “She’s a visionary, and she resizes people against a cosmic backdrop.”

Williams is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellows

Born

February 11, 1944

Genre

Short Stories, Literary Fiction

American novelist and short story writer

For other people named Joy Williams, see Joy Williams (disambiguation).

Joy Williams (born February 11, 1944) is an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Best-known for her short fiction, she is also the author of novels including State of Grace, The Quick and the Dead, and Harrow. Williams has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, a Rea Award for the Short Story, a Kirkus Award for Fiction, and a Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

Early life and education

Williams was born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. She grew up in Maine and was an only child. Her father was a Congregational minister with a church in Portland, Maine, and her grandfather was a Welsh Baptist minister.

She received a BA from Marietta College and a MFA from the University of Iowa. At Iowa, Williams studied alongside Raymond Carver, Ronald Verlin Cassill, Vance Bourjaily, and Richard Yates. After graduating from Iowa, she married and moved to Florida, where she had a dog, a beach, and a Jaguar XK150, and wrote her first novel, State of Grace.

Williams has taught creative writing at the University of Houston, the University of Florida, the University of Iowa, and the University of Arizona. For the 2008-09 academic year, Williams was the writer-in-residence at the University of Wyoming, and she continued thereafter as an affiliated faculty member of the English department. She lives in Key West, Florida, and Tucson, Arizona.

Williams was married for 34 years to Rust Hills, fiction editor for Esquire, until his death on August 12, 2008.

Work

Williams is the author of five novels. Her first novel, State of Grace (1973), was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction, and her fourth novel, The Quick and the Dead (2002), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her fir