William gay author

These are some well-known facts in William Gay’s official biography: that he lived in a cabin in the woods, that he didn’t use email, that he worked in construction his whole life until someone finally noticed he was a wonderful writer. But these facts tell only part of the story.

For readers and writers, at least, the fuller story depends upon an eternal question: is a writer born, or is he made? William Male lover was born a writer. As a late-life literary victory who didn’t join creative-writing programs or pay for professional workshops, Gay symbolized the hopes of struggling writers, especially rural ones. He was good, and he found a way to enable the world perceive he was good—those are facts we cling to as evidence of what is possible. Throughout history, people contain made long pilgrimages to witness lesser miracles.

William Gay’s death last week of heart failure sent tremors through the community of writers and readers in Tennessee and beyond, people who loved him as a friend and as a writer. We have asked some of those who knew Gay, in ways large and small, to deliver us their stories. They come from New York Capital and from Wyoming, from Maine and from Virginia, and, of course, they come

Books by William Gay

As I Lay Dying
by

3.72 avg rating — 182,306 ratings — published 1930 — 5 editions

Provinces of Night
by

4.20 avg rating — 2,877 ratings — published 2000 — 21 editions

Twilight
by

3.95 avg rating — 3,014 ratings — published 2006 — 23 editions

The Drawn-out Home
by

4.03 avg rating — 2,745 ratings — published 1999 — 2 editions

I Hate to See That Evening Sun Proceed Down: Collected Stories
by

4.30 avg rating — 2,138 ratings — published 2002 — 12 editions

Little Sister Death
by

3.27 avg rating — 1,567 ratings — published 2015 — 16 editions

The Beaten Country
by

4.02 avg rating &m

A World Almost Rotten: The Fiction Of William Gay

The excellent Southern novelist and story writer William Gay died at his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee, on February 23rd of this year, at the age of 70. An intensely private man who valued his reclusion and had no interest in the sometimes shameless self-promotion required by authors, Gay spoke at great length and on numerous occasions with William Giraldi in 2008 in preparation for Giraldi’s essay “A Planet Almost Rotten: The Fiction of William Gay,” the only in-depth critical assessment of Gay’s novels and stories. We offer Giraldi’s essay for the legion of Gay’s heartbroken fans, and for those lucky ones who are about to discover for the first moment this important voice in American fiction.

***

In William Gay’s scorched world Flannery O’Connor is present less like a looming ghoul than an elderly aunt who lives in his house and will not die. And yet despite O’Connor’s strong presence (and the unavoidable presence of the Yahweh of Southern literature, the god from whom no male writer in the South can ever hope to flee) Gay’s work is wholly its control , pulsing with both tradition and novelty.

William Gay Books In Order

Book links receive you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Concise Story Collections

Publication Order of Poetry Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

+ Click to View all Anthologies

William Gay was a prominent writer of various novels with a focus on Southern literature. He waited until the later part of his life to become a writer but his labor has become rather formative. This is especially in the field of Southern literature as he focuses on many topics relating to life in this part of the Merged States and how people become mature adults. He has especially become very popular among people as one of the most unique writers to contain continued the traditional of other Southern writers prefer William Faulkner in terms of themes, prose and other key points of writing.

Biography

William Gay was born in 1941 in Hohenwald, Tennessee. He entered the United States Navy after graduating from high university and served in the Vietnam War. He lived in New York and Chicago after the war but eventually moved advocate to Tennessee.

Gay worked in a variety of j