David Carkeet

David Carkeet (born November 15, 1946, Sonora, California) is an American novelist and essayist. Three of his novels have been named New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year.[1]

Biography

Carkeet grew up in the small northern California town where he was born and attended the University of California at Davis and Berkeley, graduating from the Davis campus with a B.A. degree in German in 1968. He received an M.A. in English literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1970 and a Ph.D. in English linguistics from Indiana University in 1973. From 1973 to 2002 he taught writing and linguistics at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. He married Barbara Lubin of Elmira, New York, in 1975, and they raised three daughters, Anne, Laurie, and Molly. He has lived in Middlesex, Vermont, since 2003.[2]

Books

Carkeet has written six novels for adults, two novels for young adults, and one memoir.[3] A comic writer in the vein of Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, and Peter De Vries, he is best known for his three novels featuring a linguist named Jeremy Cook as the protagonist:

Carkeet's other novels treat a range of subjects:

Two of Carkeet's novels are mysteries (Double Negative and From Away), and mystery figures importantly in his two young adult novels, set in the Sierra foothills of his youth - The Silent Treatment[7] and Quiver River (Harper and Row, 1988, 1991).[8][9]

His memoir:

His memoir, Campus Sexpot (University of Georgia Press, 2005), tells of the impact on his life made by a novel of the same name. The first Campus Sexpot was written by Dale Koby, a former teacher at Carkeet's high school. In it, a promiscuous, busty co-ed seduces her English instructor. The consequences include a pregnancy, a gang-rape, a resignation, and a wedding proposal. Carkeet's Campus Sexpot also details the impact the book had on Sonora, California, where he grew up. The town in which Koby's novel is set, the fictional burg of Wattsville, sounds much like Sonora — and some of the character names are virtually identical to the names of actual Sonorans.

Campus Sexpot earned Carkeet the 2004 Creative Nonfiction Award from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.[10] There are at least three Facebook pages dedicated to this work. The book has generated some controversy, however: at least two of Koby's children have criticized Carkeet's treatment of their father (Mr. Carkeet speculates that the instructor seduced by the title character represents Mr. Koby himself; Mr. Koby's children claim the real-life Lothario was someone else).[11] On the Facebook page devoted to Mr. Carkeet, someone purporting to be Mr. Koby's granddaughter has also objected to the memoir's portrayal of Mr. Koby.

There is now a sequel to Koby's novel, From Roundheel To Revolutionary: Linda Franklin After Campus Sexpot.

Short works

Carkeet has written some three dozen general interest essays for The Village Voice, The New York Times Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Oxford American, and the online journals Salon and The Morning News. In the 1990s he was a regular columnist for St. Louis magazine. His short stories have appeared in North American Review, Kansas Quarterly, and Carolina Quarterly. His critical and scholarly production includes an often-cited analysis of the dialects in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn[12][13]

Honors

In 1981, Carkeet was nominated for an Edgar Award in the first-novel category by the Mystery Writers of America for Double Negative, published the year before.[14] He won an O. Henry Award in 1982 for "The Greatest Slump of All Time," a short story originally published in Carolina Quarterly that he later expanded into the novel of the same title.[15] He received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1983,[16] and he won the Creative Nonfiction Award from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in 2004.[10]

References

  1. ↑ Routledge (2003). International Who's Who of Authors and Writers. p. 92.
  2. ↑ "Directory of Writers; Poets & Writers". Pw.org. 2011. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  3. ↑ "WorldCat catalogue". Worldcat.org. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  4. ↑ Double Negative - David Carkeet - Google Books. Books.google.com. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  5. ↑ The Full Catastrophe - David Carkeet - Google Books. Books.google.com. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  6. ↑ I Been There Before - David Carkeet - Google Books. Books.google.com. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  7. ↑ The Silent Treatment - David Carkeet - Google Books. Books.google.com. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  8. ↑ Quiver River - David Carkeet - Google Books. Books.google.com. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  9. ↑ "Something About the Author, Gale, 1994, vol. 75, pp. 21-22". Worldcat.org. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  10. 1 2 "Association of Writers & Writing Programs". Awpwriter.org. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  11. ↑ Post Jobs (2005-11-03). "Campus Sexpot". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  12. ↑ Dictionary of American Scholars. Bowker, 1982, vol. 2, p. 107. Books.google.com. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  13. ↑ The Mark Twain Encyclopedia Routledge, 1993, pp. 219-220. Books.google.com. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  14. ↑ "Edgars Database". Theedgars.com. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  15. ↑ "Bold Type: O. Henry Award Winners 1919-2000". Randomhouse.com. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
  16. ↑ "NEA Literature Fellowships: 40 Years of Supporting Writers" (PDF). Nea.gov. p. 16. Retrieved 2012-11-06.

External links

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