Charles Newman (May 27, 1938 - March 15, 2006) was a novelist, critic, professor, and founding editor of TriQuarterly, one of the preeminent literary magazines of the later twentieth century. He was born in St Louis, Missouri and studied at Yale University where he earned a B.A. in American Studies. A Woodrow Wilson fellow and Fulbright scholar, he went on to study at Balliol College, Oxford, before serving as a medic in Vietnam. In 1964, he took a position as an instructor at Northwestern University where he would later take on the campus literary magazine, TriQuarterly.
Under Newman’s editorship TriQuarterly flourished, publishing experimental and international writing that would change the course of American literature. He championed writers like William H. Gass, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, Susan Sontag, and Joyce Carol Oats. He introduced American readers to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Carlos Fuentes, Czesław Miłosz, E.M. Cioran, Mario Vagas Llosa, and many others. Although the magazine was well-respected as an avenue for Avant-Garde American publishing, financial and management issue continued to plague it, resulting in Newman’s departure in 1975.
Newman left Northwestern University in 1975 to serve as chairperson at Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminar. There, he was able to attract impressive roster of instructors including David St. John, William Arrowsmith, Garry Wills, Leonard Michaels and Andrei Codrescu. After three years, Newman decided to retire to a farm in Virginia and breed Hungarian hunting dogs. But in 1985 he returned to the academy, taking a position as a creative writing professor at Washington University in St Louis, where he remained until his passing in 2006.
Newman published four novels: New Axis (1966), The Promisekeeper: A Tephramancy (1971), Thee Must Be More to Love Than Death (1976), and White Jazz (1983). Newman published criticism including A Child’s History of America (1973), and The Post-Modern Aura (1985). He received many awards including the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters (1975), Guggenheim Fellowship (1974–75), Rockefeller Grant for Creative Writing Fellowship (1973), National Endowment for Creative Writing Fellowship (1974), and Best American Short Stories (1972, 1977).
Charles Newman spent the last two decades of his life working on a sprawling 1,500-page trilogy, Cannonia, loosely inspired by his lifetime fascination with Hungary. He married and divorced four times, and had no children. Newman died in St Louis, Missouri of a heart attack on March 15, 2006.
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