Thursday, September 7, 2006

If you are looking for a Minnesota Catholic author who really can write well, try J.F. Powers

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Joseph Bottum of the First Things blog has a nice bit on J.F. Powers today, who spent much of his life at St John's in Collegeville and received many writing awards during his lifetime. But he has been forgotten recently.

I was hunting this weekend for a line from James Farl Powers—J.F. Powers, as he signed himself—and got caught again in the strength of his prose. Powers is such a curious figure: the greatest of the writers in the 1950s American Catholic renaissance, and the most faded.

After his death in 1999, I noted (in a literary column I wrote in those days) that in a fifty-year career, he published only five books, one a decade, to considerable acclaim. The work often called his masterpiece, the novel Morte D’Urban, won the prestigious National Book Award in 1963. But those were the brief, glorious days of highbrow honors descending on the American Catholic literary renaissance that had been building since the 1940s—Walker Percy had won the same award the year before for The Moviegoer—and Morte D’UrbanWheat That Springeth Green. So were his 1947 collection The Prince of Darkness and Other Stories, his 1956 collection The Presence of Grace, and his 1975 collection Look How the Fish Live. When J.F. Powers died in 1999, there wasn’t left a single book in print by the man who was declared by the likes of Evelyn Waugh, Frank O’Connor, Allen Tate, and Robert Lowell to be the most delicate Catholic writer they knew. was long out of print by the time of Powers’ death. So was his second novel, the well-received 1988 [snip] Read the whole piece.

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