James Wilcox
MacCurdy Professor
E-mail: jwilcox1@lsu.edu
Biography
After graduating from Yale in 1971, James Wilcox worked at Random House and Doubleday in New York. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and Avenue—and he has published nine novels, including Modern Baptists, which was included in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon. In 1986 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Wilcox’s book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Elle. He has been a judge for the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for the best first-published book of fiction by an American writer published in 1991; for the 1994 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award; for the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society novella contest in 1999; and for the Eudora Welty Prize for Fiction given by The Southern Review in 2005. He was the recipient an ATLAS grant for 2007-08. LSU recognized him as the 2008 Distinguished Research Master of Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences. In 2009 he won an LSU Distinguished Faculty Award. In 2010 he was appointed to the MacCurdy Distinguished Professorship in English. He was the recipient of the Louisiana Writer Award for 2011.
Selected Publications
Novels:
Modern Baptists
The Dial Press, NY, 1983
Penguin, Contemporary American Fiction Series, NY, 1984
The Alison Press/Secker & Warburg, London , 1984
King Penguin , England , 1985
Perennial Library, NY, 1990
Fourth Estate, Ltd., London , 1996
Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Co., Boston , NY , 1999
Penguin Modern Classics, London , 2006
Louisiana State University Press, 2006
North Gladiola
Harper & Row, NY, 1985
The Alison Press/Secker & Warburg, London , 1985
Perennial Library, NY, 1986
Paladin/Grafton Books, London , 1987
Fourth Estate, Ltd., London , 1997
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge , 2000
Miss Undine's Living Room
Harper & Row, NY, 1987
The Alison Press/Secker & Warburg, London , 1987
Perennial Library, NY, 1988
Fourth Estate, Ltd., London , 1996
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge , 2001
Sort of Rich
Harper & Row, NY, 1989
Perennial Library, NY, 1990
The Alison Press/Secker & Warburg, London , 1990
Fourth Estate, Ltd., London , 1998
Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Co., Boston , NY , 1999
Polite Sex
HarperCollins , NY , 1991
Perennial Library, NY, 1993
Fourth Estate, Ltd., London , 1996
Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Co., Boston , NY , 1999
Guest of a Sinner
HarperCollins , NY , 1993
Perennial Library, NY, 1995
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge , 2004
Plain and Normal
Little, Brown and Co., Boston , NY , 1998
Fourth Estate, Ltd., London , 1998
Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Co., Boston , NY , 1999
Ma'ariv Book Guild (Hebrew translation by Miki Goren), Or Yehuda, Israel ,
2002
Heavenly Days
Viking, New York , NY , 2003
Penguin Books, 2004
Hunk City
Viking, New York , NY , 2007
Penguin Books, New York , NY , 2008
Short stories:
"Mr. Ray" The New Yorker , Jan. 26, 1981
"Camping Out" The New Yorker , Dec. 14, 1981 ; included in Wide Awake in the Pelican State: Stories by
Contemporary Louisiana Writers , ed. by Ann Brewster Dobie, With a Forward by Ernest J. Gaines, LSU
Press, Baton Rouge, 2006
"Seventy Times Seven" Avenue , May, 1982 "The Ivy in the Chimney" The New Yorker , Jan. 6, 1986
Courses Taught
7006 Fiction Writing
7106 Forms of Prose Fiction
7920 Literature and Publishing
4105 Capstone Seminar in Writing Fiction
4005 Short Story Writing
4000 Literature and Publishing (for undergraduates)