Andre Dubus

Andre Jules Dubus II (August 11, 1936 – February 24, 1999) was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays.<ref name=Beatrice>Template:Cite interview</ref>

Early life and education

Andre Jules Dubus II was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the youngest of three children of Katherine (née Burke) and André Jules Dubus, in a Cajun-Irish Catholic family. The author James Lee Burke is his first cousin.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Dubus grew up in the Bayou in Lafayette, Louisiana, and was educated by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order that emphasized literature and writing. Dubus graduated from nearby McNeese State College in 1958 as a journalism and English major.

Dubus then spent six years in the Marine Corps, rising to the rank of captain. During this time, he married his first wife and started a family. After leaving the Marine Corps, Dubus moved with his wife and four children to Iowa City, where he later graduated from the University of Iowa's Iowa Writers' Workshop with an MFA in creative writing, studying under Richard Yates. The family then moved to Haverhill, Massachusetts, where Dubus would spend the bulk of his academic career teaching literature and creative writing at Bradford College.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Influences and reputation

Dubus is identified as a Catholic writer, and as a southern writer, as he carried his heritage as a Louisiana Catholic throughout his life. His influences included Ernest Hemingway, Anton Chekhov, and John Cheever.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

His short stories are recognized for their realism and humanism, their multi-dimensional characters and their complex view of the human condition. He is admired for his storytelling craft and his attention to tangible detail. His themes include the complicated sexual politics of the Catholic Church, and his subject matter falls roughly into the categories of childhood and youth; stories of military life; violence, revenge, and forgiveness; and fathers, marriage, and divorce.

Throughout his career, Dubus published most of his work in literary journals such as Ploughshares<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and the Sewanee Review, though he also placed stories in magazines such as The New Yorker and Playboy. Dubus remained loyal to the small publishing firm Godine until the end of his career, when medical bills forced him to switch to Alfred A. Knopf.

Personal difficulties

Dubus's life was marked by several tragedies. The rape of his daughter caused Dubus many years of paranoia over his loved ones' safety.<ref>Suzanne's rape had done something to our father. Almost immediately after it, he drove to the Haverhill police station and applied for a license to carry. Now he owned a silver snub-nose .38 he kept unloaded in one of the desk drawers. When he went out to dinner with his wife or friends, he carried it in a shadow holster on his belt, and he covered it with his shirt or vest. He seemed to talk about self-defense more than I'd ever heard him talk about it before. Source: Dubus, Andre III. Townie: A Memoir. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011, page 146.</ref> Dubus carried personal firearms to protect himself and those around him, until the night in the late 1980s, when he almost shot a man who was in a drunken argument with his son outside a bar in Haverhill.<ref>Dubus, Andre III, Townie: A Memoir. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011, pages 237-248.</ref>

On July 23, 1986, Dubus was driving from Boston to his home in Haverhill and stopped to help two people at the scene of an accident. A third vehicle hit the three of them. Dubus' back was broken and both his legs were crushed.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> After a series of operations, his right leg was amputated above the knee, and he eventually lost the use of his left leg.

To help Dubus with mounting medical bills, his friends and fellow writers Ann Beattie, E.L. Doctorow, John Irving, Gail Godwin, Stephen King, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Yates held a special literary benefit in Boston and raised $86,000.

Despite his efforts to walk with a prosthesis, chronic infections led to him using a wheelchair for the remainder of his life, and he battled clinical depression. Over the course of these struggles, his wife left him, taking with her their two young daughters.

Final years

Dubus eventually continued to write after his accident and produced two books of essays, including Broken Vessels, which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and a collection of short stories. Dubus also conducted a weekly writers' workshop in his home.

Personal life and death

Andre Dubus was married twice and fathered six children. His son Andre Dubus III is also an author who, in 2011, published a memoir, Townie, which tells of growing up in Haverhill and his relationship with his father.

Dubus died of a heart attack at his home in Haverhill in 1999, at age 62. He is buried in nearby Greenwood Cemetery.Template:Cn

Works

Short story collections

• Separate Flights (1975)
• Adultery and Other Choices (1977)
• Finding a Girl in America (1980)
• The Times Are Never So Bad (1983)
• The Last Worthless Evening (1986)
• Selected Stories (1988)
• Dancing After Hours (1996)
• In the Bedroom: Seven Stories (2002)

Novels and novellas

• The Lieutenant (1967)
• We Don’t Live Here Anymore (1984)
• Voices from the Moon (1984)

Non-fiction

• Broken Vessels (1991)
• Meditations from a Movable Chair: Essays (1998)

In 2018, Godine published all Dubus' fiction produced between the mid-1970s and late 1980s in three volumes: We Don't Live Here Anymore: Collected Short Stories & Novellas, Volume 1, The Winter Father: Collected Short Stories & Novellas, Volume 2, and The Cross Country Runner: Collected Short Stories & Novellas, Volume 3.

Italian writer and editor Nicola Manuppelli has translated six collections of short stories and novellas by Dubus for Italian publisher Mattioli 1885: "Separate Flights" ("Voli separati"), "The Times Are Never So Bad" ("I tempi non sono mai così cattivi"), "Voices From The Moon" ("Voci dalla luna"), "We Don't Live Here Anymore" ("Non abitiamo più qui"), "Finding a girl in America" ("Il padre d'inverno") "Dancing After Hours" ("Ballando a notte fonda"). For the publication of these works, Manuppelli has included introductions or afterwords by several American authors, including Dennis Lehane, Peter Orner, and Tobias Wolff, among others.

Cinematic adaptations

The Dubus story "Killings" was adapted into Todd Field's 2001 film In the Bedroom.

The 2004 movie We Don't Live Here Anymore is based upon two of Dubus's novellas, "We Don't Live Here Anymore" and "Adultery".

Several writing awards are named after Dubus. His papers are archived at McNeese State University and Xavier University in Louisiana and at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Awards and honors

• L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award (for debut collection Separate Flights), 1975
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1976
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1986
• Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1988
• MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 1988
• PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, 1991
• Pulitzer Prize, Nominee (for nonfiction, Broken Vessels), 1992
• National Book Critics Circle Award, Finalist (for fiction, Dancing After Hours), 1996
• Rea Award for the Short Story, 1996

Further reading

• Anderson, Donald. Andre Dubus: Tributes. Xavier Review Press, 2001.
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• Breslin, John B. "Patterns of Sin and Grace: The Catholic Imagination of Andre Dubus". Commonweal Magazine, 1988.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Cocchiarale, Michael. "The Complicated Catholicism of Andre Dubus" in Songs of the New South: Writing Contemporary Louisiana. 2001.
• Edenfield, Olivia Carr (ed.). Conversations with Andre Dubus. University Press of Mississippi, 2013.
• Edenfield, Olivia Carr. Understanding Andre Dubus. University of South Carolina Press, 2017.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Feeney, Joseph J. "Poised for Fame: Andre Dubus at Fifty". America Magazine 1986.
• Ferriss, Lucy. "Andre Dubus: Never Truly Members" in Southern Writers at Century’s End. University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
• Gresham, Ross. Leap of the Heart: Andre Dubus Talking. Xavier Review Press, 2003.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• Lesser, Ellen. "True Confession: Andre Dubus Talks Straight". The Village Voice, 1989.
• Mambrol, Nasrullah. "Analysis of Andre Dubus’s Stories". Literary Theory and Criticism, 2020.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Miner, Madone. "Jumping from One Heart to Another: How Andre Dubus Writes About Women" in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 1997.
• Rowe, Anne E. "Andre Dubus" in Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South. Greenwood Press, 1993.
• Todd, David Yandell. "An Interview with Andre Dubus". The Yale Review, 1998.
• Updike, John. Review of Voices from the Moon, The New Yorker, 1985.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• Yarbrough, Steve. "Andre Dubus: From Detached Incident to Compressed Novel". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 1986.

External links

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