Lee k abbott biography of mahatma
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Like Cheever, Abbott limns people and places with the precision of a watchmaker. In the hands of a master like Lee Abbott, however, the short story becomes something more—a microcosmic view of the world of Everyman and Everywoman, where calamity, loneliness, haplessness and heartbreak are revealed with both painful authenticity and comic acceptance.
Short stories are often compared to snapshots, but in Abbott’s case the more apt analogy is to holograms.
From the Kenyon Review, in this 2016 episode novelist Nick White talks to Lee K. Abbott.
“Lee K. Abbott: Craft Talk.” Lecture given at Colgate University on June 18, 2003.
Genres: Fiction, Short Story
Abbott was the recipient of the 2004 Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2007 OSU promoted him to Humanities Distinguished Professor.
“You can do this slow or with dispatch,” Scooter told him. His tales almost always feature a few kooks and oddballs, to be sure, but for the most part the stories are populated by average folks engaged in the same quests we all pursue—looking for meaning in life, for understanding and, above all, for love. Abbott once described the American Southwest as “what I know…it’s a place where the firsts happened: first drunk, first sex, first death.
And he does so in a style purely his own, at once straightforward, quirky, formally intelligent and unabashedly acrobatic.
Most of Abbott’s readers harbor a frustration that, in its way, is one of the highest compliments an author can receive. He earned the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature in 1982. That Abbott chooses to present his protagonists’ tribulations in a comic light reminds us that absurdity is as much a part of the human condition as suffering or joy.
He earned the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature in 1982.
Known as a dynamic and engaging teacher, students gave him good reviews consistently. After retiring to his native New Mexico, Abbott was named Distinguished Visiting Professor within the English Department of his alma mater, New Mexico University.
Lee K. Abbott died of Leukemia on April 29, 2019, in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Awards:
Fellow, National Endowment for the Arts, 1979 and 1985; St.
Lawrence Award for Fiction, Fiction International, 1981, for The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting; O. Henry Prize, Doubleday & Co., 1984, for “Living Alone in Iota,” and 1997; Prize for Fiction, Story Quarterly, 1985, for “Youth on Mars”; National Magazine Award from Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and Editors’ Choice Award from Wampeter-Doubleday, both 1986, both for “Time and Fear and Somehow Love”; Pushcart Prize, Pushcart Press, 1986, for “X,” 1987, and 1989, for “The Era of Great Numbers”; Major Artist Fellowship, Ohio Arts Council, 1991-92; Governor’s Award for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, 1993; Syndicated Fiction Award, 1995.
Works:
Wet Places at Noon (1997)
The Putt at the End of the World (2000)
All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories (2006)
Additional Resources:
KR Podcast.
His best work presents fully realized, three-dimensional characters and settings that are as vivid as life itself. And so, aiming to change his fortunes, he stuffed his clothes in a ditty bag and, hitching, lit out, heading south.
“I know the many ways to kill a man,” he told the first dude to give him a ride.
“Me, I’m gonna find it, shake its muscular hand.” Unmarried, his heart a fist slamming against his ribs, without gifts or vision, lacking a home and ordinary parents, Scooter Watts was doomed, Friends, as unlikely and unwelcome a being as Godzilla. Abbott was born in the Panama Canal Zone, on October 17, 1947, and reared in New Mexico, where most of his short stories are set.
He was the author of seven highly praised and award-winning short story collections that include: The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting (1980), Love is a Crooked Thing (1986), Strangers in Paradise (1987), Dreams of Distant Lives (1989), Living After Midnight (1991), Wet Places at Noon (1997) and All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories (2006).
That Abbott chooses to present his protagonists’ tribulations in a comic light reminds us that absurdity is as much a part of the human condition as suffering or joy. Indeed, the confusions and missteps of his characters are often the most profound revelations of their humanity.
Abbott served on the faculty of the English department of Case Western Reserve University from 1976 to 1989, during which period he won one of his two O.
Henry Awards and all three of his Pushcart Prizes. His best work presents fully realized, three-dimensional characters and settings that are as vivid as life itself.