Joseph McElroy

Updated on Sep 27, 2024

Edit

Comment

Occupation Novelist, Professor Role Novelist		Name Joseph McElroy Nationality American

Born August 21, 1930 (age 94) New York City, United States ( 1930-08-21 ) Notable works Lookout Cartridge,Women and Men Education Columbia University (1961), Williams College (1951) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada Books Women and Men, Cannonball, Lookout Cartridge, Actress in the House, Night Soul and Other Stories Similar People William Gaddis, William H Gass, Robert Coover, William T Vollmann, Alexander Theroux
Literary movement Postmodern literature

Joseph McElroy on Bookworm (2003) [Part 1]

Joseph Prince McElroy (born August 21, 1930) is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is noted for writing difficult fiction.

Joseph McElroy Joseph McElroy bibliomanic

Joseph McElroy Women and Men two editions & machine gun is playing

Personal background

Joseph McElroy Book Review Night Soul and Other Stories WSJ

Joseph McElroy was born on August 21, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Joseph Prince and Louise (née Lawrence) McElroy. McElroy's father was a scholarship student to Harvard University who majored in chemistry, but later worked as a stockbroker. He died when McElroy was 15 years old.

Joseph McElroy Joseph McElroy Author of A Smuggler39s Bible

McElroy grew up in Brooklyn Heights. He graduated from Poly Prep Country Day School in 1947 and was given an Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award in 2007 from the school's Board of Governors. He attended Williams College, from where he earned a Bachelor's degree in 1951. The following year, he earned a Masters degree from Columbia University. He served in the Coast Guard from 1952–54, and then returned to Columbia to complete his Ph.D. in 1961.

Joseph McElroy Joseph McElroy vwalivecom

In 1961, McElroy married Joan Leftwich, of London, in London. She is the daughter of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews. Her father, Joseph Leftwich, was a translator and anthologizer of Yiddish poetry. The McElroys' only child, a daughter Hanna, was born in 1967. McElroy assisted with the birth.

Career

McElroy taught English at the University of New Hampshire (1956–62) and retired from teaching in 1995, after 31 years in the English department at Queens College, City University of New York.

McElroy's writing is often grouped with that of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, due to the encyclopedic quality of his novels, particularly the 1,192 pages of Women and Men (1987). His short fiction was first published in literary journals. Echoes of McElroy's work can be found in that of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. McElroy's work often reflects a preoccupation with how science functions in American society; Exponential, a collection of essays published in Italy in 2003, collects science and technology journalism written primarily in the 1970s and 1980s for the New York Review of Books.

In 1980, McElroy and his class at Queens College interviewed Norman Mailer. He interviewed Harry Mathews in 2002 for the Village Voice.

McElroy commented on his own fiction and his influences in his "Neural Neighborhoods" essay.

Honors and awards

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Fiction, 1976

American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, 1977

Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship

Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship, twice

National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, twice

Novels

A Smuggler's Bible, Harcourt Brace, 368 pages, 1966. ISBN 978-0233959764

Hind's Kidnap: A Pastoral on Familiar Airs, Harper and Row, 534 pages, 1969. ISBN 978-0893661052

Ancient History: A Paraphase, Knopf, 307 pages, 1971. ISBN 978-0394469256

Lookout Cartridge, Knopf, 531 pages, 1974. ISBN 978-0394493756

Plus, Knopf, 215 pages, 1977. ISBN 978-0394407944

Women and Men, Knopf, 1192 pages, 1987. ISBN 978-0394503448

The Letter Left to Me, Knopf, 151 pages, 1988. ISBN 978-0394571966

Actress in the House, Overlook, 432 pages, 2003. ISBN 978-1585673506

Cannonball, Dzanc Books, 312 pages, 2013. ISBN 978-1938604218

Short stories

Ship Rock: A Place, William B. Ewert, Concord, New Hampshire, limited edition, 42 pages, 1980

republished as a chapter in Women and Men, 1987

Preparations for Search 1984

revised and printed as a chapbook, by Small Anchor Press, 2010

Night Soul and Other Stories, Dalkey Archive Press, 304 pages, 2011. ISBN 978-1564786029

Essays

Exponential (2003; published in Italy)

"Neural Neighborhoods and Other Concrete Abstracts,"

References

Joseph McElroy Wikipedia

(Text) CC BY-SA