Joy Williams Papers (MSS158), 1944-2018
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Administrative/Biographical History
Joy Williams (February 11, 1944 - ) is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, Williams received a BA from Marietta College and a MFA from the University of Iowa. She lives in Key West, Florida, and Tucson, Arizona. Williams was married for 34 years to L. Rust Hills, fiction editor for Esquire, until his death on August 12, 2008.
An acclaimed fiction writer and essayist, Williams is the author of four novels, five short-story collections and one essay collection. Her 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 by literary giants like Harold Brodkey, James Salter, William Gass, and Raymond Carver as a major writer. In 1973, Truman Capote called State of Grace “the best novel of the year.” Williams’ first stories were published in The New Yorker, Esquire, and the Paris Review, and during the late 1970s, George Plimpton said that Williams “towers over most contemporary fiction.” In 2000, Plimpton declared that she 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’ 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 book 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. See Samuel Beckett.” Karen Russell said of Williams, “She’s a visionary, and she resizes people against a cosmic backdrop.”
Williams is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2018, The Paris Review presented her with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. The annual award is given to an eminent member of the writing community who has made a notable and lasting contribution to literature. Previous recipients include Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, and William Styron. Williams has taught creative writing at institutions across the country, including the University of Iowa and the University of Wyoming, where she is Visiting Eminent Writer in Residence. She has a long history as a visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University.
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