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Born in Tennessee in 1939, William Gay began writing at fifteen and wrote his first novel at twenty-five, but didn’t begin publishing until well into his fifties. He worked as a TV salesman, in local factories, did construction, hung sheetrock, and painted houses to support himself. He preferred to sit in a kitchen chair at the edge of the woods with a spiral-bound notebook on his knee, writing in his peculiar scrawling longhand. His works include The Long Home, Provinces of Night, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, Wittgenstein’s Lolita, and Twilight. His work has been adapted for the screen twice, That Evening Sun (2009) and Bloodworth (2010). Most recently, his debut novel has been optioned for film. He died in 2012.
Praise for William Gay Gay's great abilities in character building, richness of language and storytelling are on full display. -Charles Frazier, author of Varina William Gay is richly gifted: a seemingly effortless storyteller...a writer of prose that's fiercely wrought, pungent in detail yet poetic in the most welcome sense. -The New York Times Book Review Gay's style was fully formed: sinister and lovely, dark and atmospheric, blood-soaked and word-drunk. He fit squarely in the Southern Gothic tradition, but the languid, unrolling richness of his language made the stories and novels that followed feel fresh, a rebirth of a genre prone to pale imitations. -Wall Street Journal The pleasure that Gay, a self-educated Vietnam veteran, takes from language is frequently a thing of beauty...A Dickensian feel for character makes his stories surge with life while the sharp dialogue is furious, funny and very southern. ....Gay, an instinctive original, had the spark of natural genius. -The Irish Times William Gay could write a grocery list and make it sing and burn off the pages in equal measure. -Heavy Feather Review William Gay is a flat-out monster. -Parnassus Recommended Reads A writer of striking talent. -Chicago Tribune Writers like Flannery O'Connor or William Faulkner would welcome Gay as their peer for getting characters so entangled in the roots of a family tree. -Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
