Name David Carkeet | Role Novelist | |
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Education Indiana University Bloomington (1973), University of Wisconsin-Madison Nominations Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author Books The full catastrophe, Campus Sexpot, Double Negative, The error of our ways, The Greatest Slump of | ||
Mark Twain House and Grave in Elmira, NY 1989
David Carkeet (born November 15, 1946, Sonora, California) is an American novelist and essayist. Three of his novels have been named New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year.
Contents
- Mark Twain House and Grave in Elmira NY 1989
- Biography
- Books
- Plays
- Short works
- Honors
- Bibliongraphy
- References
Biography
Carkeet grew up in the small northern California town where he was born and attended the University of California at Davis and Berkeley, graduating from the Davis campus with a B.A. degree in German in 1968. He received an M.A. in English literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1970 and a Ph.D. in English linguistics from Indiana University in 1973. From 1973 to 2002 he taught writing and linguistics at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. He married Barbara Lubin of Elmira, New York, in 1975, and they raised three daughters, Anne, Laurie, and Molly. He has lived in Middlesex, Vermont, since 2003.
Books
Carkeet has written six novels for adults, two novels for young adults, and one memoir. A comic writer in the vein of Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, and Peter De Vries, he is best known for his three novels featuring a linguist named Jeremy Cook as the protagonist:
Carkeet's other novels treat a range of subjects:
Two of Carkeet's novels are mysteries (Double Negative and From Away), and mystery figures importantly in his two young adult novels, set in the Sierra foothills of his youth - The Silent Treatment and Quiver River (Harper and Row, 1988, 1991).
His novel The Full Catastrophe has been adapted for the stage by Michael Weller. The play premiered in 2015 at the Contemporary American Theater Festival.
His Memoir:
His memoir, Campus Sexpot (University of Georgia Press, 2005), tells of the impact on his life made by a 1961 novel of the same name written by a former English teacher at Carkeet's high school. In it, a busty co-ed seduces her English instructor. Carkeet's Campus Sexpot also details the impact the book had on Sonora, California, where he grew up. The town in which the original novel is set, the fictional burg of Wattsville, sounds much like Sonora, and some of the characters' names are virtually identical to the names of actual Sonorans. Carkeet's Campus Sexpot has generated some controversy, with some of the original author's descendants objecting to Carkeet's portrayal of him. In addition to inspiring Carkeet's memoir, the original novel generated a fictional sequel, From Roundheel To Revolutionary: Linda Franklin After Campus Sexpot, by Jeff Daiell.
Plays
In 2016, Carkeet adapted selected comic Mark Twain short stories into stage plays--"Buck Fanshaw's Funeral," "Cannibalism in the Cars," "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," "The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm," and others. The full collection, "Seven by Twain," consists of six ten-minute plays and one one-hour play ("The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg").
Short works
Carkeet has written some three dozen general interest essays for The Village Voice, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Poets & Writers, The Oxford American, and the online journals Salon and The Morning News. In the 1990s he was a regular columnist for St. Louis magazine. His short stories have appeared in North American Review, Kansas Quarterly, and Carolina Quarterly. His critical and scholarly production includes an often-cited analysis of the dialects in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Honors
In 1981, Carkeet was nominated for an Edgar Award in the first-novel category by the Mystery Writers of America for Double Negative, published the year before. He won an O. Henry Award in 1982 for "The Greatest Slump of All Time," a short story originally published in Carolina Quarterly that he later expanded into the novel of the same title. He received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1983, and he won the Creative Nonfiction Award from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in 2004.