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Gordon Lish

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Gordon Jay Lish
Pen nameCaptain Fiction
OccupationShort story writer, essayist, journalist, professor
NationalityAmerican
GenreFiction
Literary movementMiminalist Fiction
Notable worksDr Mr. Capote
ChildrenJennifer, Rebecca Lish, Ethan, and Atticus
RelativesAnne, Carla, Ezra, Pearl, Nina, and Isaac (all grandchildren)

Biography

Gordon Jay Lish (born February 11, 1934 in Hewlett, New York) is an American writer. As a literary editor, he championed many American authors, particularly Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and Richard Ford.

He is a father of four (Jennifer, Rebecca, Ethan, and Atticus), and a grandfather of six (Anne, and Carla, children of Jennifer; Pearl and Ezra, children of Rebecca; and Nina and Isaac, children of Ethan).

History

From 1986 to 1996, Gordon Lish was founder and editor of The Quarterly, Vintage Books, thereafter the Rosenkranz Foundation. He was an editor at Alfred A. Knopf from 1977 to 1995. He was fiction editor of Esquire from 1969 to 1977. In the ‘60s, he was the editor and founder of the literary magazines The Chrysalis Review and Genesis West, the latter of which associated itself with the fiction of Ken Kesey, the marvels of Neal Cassady, and the poetry of Jack Gilbert.

He is the author of the novels Dear Mr. Capote, Peru, Extravaganza, My Romance, Zimzum, Epigraph, and Mourner at the Door, Selected Stories, Self-Imitation of Myself, Sounds in American Fiction, The Secret Life of Our Times: with an introduction by Tom Wolfe, and All Our Secrets Are the Same.

While director of linguistic studies at Behavioral Research Laboratories, of Palo Alto, Lish produced English Grammar and Why Work, this latter for the Office of Economic Opportunity; he was thereafter attached to Educational Development Corporation, also of Palo Alto, where he produced A Man’s Work for McGraw-Hill.

Lish has taught imaginative writing at Yale, Columbia, and New York University, and is known for his many years of presenting private class, each session of which was six to ten and a half hours in duration.

Lish was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1984. Lish’s fictions have been anthologized in such standards as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and Pushcart Prize, and he has contributed essays on Jewish matters to the books Congregation (HBJ) and Testimony (Times Books).

Lish is thought to be a figure of controversy; his activities—as teacher, writer, editor, publisher—have been the subject of scores of newspaper and magazine articles, of television appearances, and, in the early ‘90s, of a litigation wherein he opposed Harper’s on a question of copyright infringement, and prevailed.

He is generally described as our foremost teacher of creative writing, and in respect of his latest book, Kirkus said “Lish is our Joyce, our Beckett, our truest modernist”).

His papers are collected by the Lilly Library, at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. In August of 1993 he was awarded an honorary Litt. D. by the State University of New York. Lish was elected to the Century Association in 1985, but not long thereafter resigned his membership.

In November of 1994, Le Nouvel Observateur cited Lish as “one of the one hundred major writers of our time.”

While at Esquire, Lish championed the work of Don DeLillo (to the publication of whose first play, The Engineer of Moonlight, Lish contributed an afterword), Cynthia Ozick, Harold Brodkey, Barry Hannah, Joy Williams, and Raymond Carver, and brought out, while at Knopf, books by Denis Donoghue, Jack Gilbert, Mary Robison, Amy Hempel, Raymond Carver, Janet Kauffman, David Sudnow, Frederick Busch, Patricia Lear, Sheila Kohler, Barry Hannah, Lily Tuck, Sam Michel, Noy Holland, Gary Lutz, Jason Schwartz, Dawn Raffel, Anne Carson, William Ferguson, Raymond Kennedy, Thomas Lynch, Ben Marcus, Brian Evenson, Nancy Lemann, William Tester, Peter Christopher, Leon Rooke, Paulette Jiles, Anderson Ferrell, Greg Mulcahy, Douglas Glover, Mark Richard, Victoria Redel, Bruce McCall, Hob Broun, John S. P. Walker, Yannick Murphy, Thomas Glynn, Ann Pyne, Ted Pejovich, Walter Kirn, Jennifer Allen, Christine Schutt, Michael Martone, Bette Howland, Roy Blount, Chaim Grade, Bette Pesetsky, Michael Hickins, Robert Plunket, Ken Sparling, Diane Williams, and Rudy Wilson.

Lish also published, as Gordon Lish A Book for McGraw-Hill, Raymond Carver’s first collection of stories, "Will Your Please Be Quiet, Please".

Lish was famously fired from his job (see "A Life Decoded", by J. Craig Venter, Viking, 2007, and “The Man Who Taught Too Well,” The Nation, an article by Donovan Bess, June 15, 1963) as a teacher of English at Mills High School, in Millbrae, California.

Before taking up teaching, Lish worked, in radio, at stations KPDN, WELI, and WVNJ.

He married Frances Fokes in 1956, in Tucson, Arizona (children: Jennifer, Rebecca, Ethan), and wed, in 1969, in Carmel, California, Barbara Works (one child: Atticus). Barbara Lish succumbed to amiotropic lateral sclerosis in September of 1994.

For some years Lish ghostwrote a variety of books (for example, Coming Out of the Ice, by Victor Herman, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) and produced, under various pseudonyms, other titles of fiction and non-fiction.

It is believed he is the author of a book called The Psoriasis Diet, by Jackman Gillette. Gillette is also credited as author of [[Psoriasis: The Story of a Man], published 1980 by Horizon Press.

Lish has six grandchildren and lives in New York City.

Lish was interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show in 1991.

In February 1977, Esquire ran the unsigned fiction “For Rupert—With No Promises,” written, it was widely thought, by J. D. Salinger. It was later revealed, in a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal, that it was Lish—not Cheever or Updike, as insiders had speculated—who was responsible for the hoax. Lish is said to have perpetrated other hoaxes along this line.

The press—most prominently The New Yorker and The New York Times—has made much of Lish’s participation in the composition of Raymond Carver’s short stories. Investigation into Carver's original typescripts, as they were before Lish edited them, have shown them to be radically different from the work that was published as being by Raymond Carver during Carver's lifetime.

Lish often edited Carver's stories even after published in journals. In Lish's archives at the Lilly Library, in the file for Will You Please be Quiet, Please?, Lish's hand-written editorial marks are found on photocopies of stories from literary magazines.

Lish was born, in Hewlett, New York, in 1934, and attended Phillips Academy, Andover (dismissed without diploma), and was graduated from the University of Arizona, in 1959, with honors in English and German, and thereafter attained a secondary-school teaching credential at San Francisco State College.

In 2009, Routledge published Michael Hemmingson's Gordon Lish and His Influence on 20th Century American Literature, in their Studies of Major Literary Authors Series. The book is a critical look at Lish's fiction and his editing not only of Carver and Barry Hannah, but a number of other important American writers.

Lish is the source of the information that he was fired from every job he ever had. No few of Lish’s students have gone on to notable careers in writing and teaching. Lish is the son of Philip and Regina Lish.

Select English bibliography

  • A Man's Work, New York : McGraw-Hill, (1967), OCLC 5855822
  • All Our Secrets are The Same, New York : Norton, (1976), ISBN 0393087484 LCCN 76040486 OCLC 2425115
  • Arcade, or, How to write a novel, New York : Four Walls Eight Windows, (1998), ISBN 1-56858-115-7 LCCN 98026693
  • Dear Mr. Capote, New York : Holt, Rinehart & Winston, (1986), ISBN 0-030-61477-5 LCCN 85026276
  • English Grammar, Palo Alto, Ca.: Behavioral Research Laboratories, (1964) OCLC 11328343
  • Epigraph, New York : Four Walls Eight Windows, (1996), ISBN 1-56858-076-2 LCCN 96019753
  • Extravaganza, New York : Putnam, (1989), ISBN 0-399-13417-4 LCCN 88028146 OCLC 18463582
  • Krupp’s Lulu, New York : Four Walls Eight Windows, (2000), ISBN 1-56858-154-8 LCCN 99086329 OCLC 43324258
  • Mourner at the door, New York : Penguin Books, (1988), ISBN 0-140-10680-4 LCCN 88031663
  • My Romance, New York : Norton, (1991), ISBN 0-393-03001-6 LCCN 90024142 OCLC 22766592
  • New Sounds in American Fiction, Menlo Park : Cummings Pub. Co. (1969), LCCN 68058434 OCLC 4102981
  • Peru, New York : E.P. Dutton, (1986), ISBN 0-525-24375-5 LCCN 85013015 OCLC 12216053
  • Self-imitation of Myself, New York : Four Walls Eight Windows, (1997), ISBN 1-56858-098-3 LCCN 97013200 OCLC 36713172
  • The Secret Life of Our Times, Garden City : Doubleday, (1973), ISBN 0-385-06215-X LCCN 73080734 OCLC 754648
  • The Selected Stories of Gordon Lish, Toronto : Somerville House Pub., (1996), ISBN 1-895897-74-2 OCLC 35927592
  • What I know so far, New York : Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, (1984), ISBN 0-03-070609-2 LCCN 83012980 OCLC 9830715
  • Why Work, Palo Alto, Ca.: Behavioral Research Laboratories, (1966), OCLC 62726395
  • Zimzum, New York : Pantheon, (1993), ISBN 0-679-42685-X LCCN 93003360 OCLC 27769736

Quotes

  • "The secret of good writing is telling the truth." -- Dick Cavett television interview, Aug. 25, 1991
  • "It’s not what happens to people on the page; it’s about what happens to a reader in his heart and mind."
  • "I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire."
  • "Never be sincere — sincerity is the death of writing"

Awards

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