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Gordon Jay Lish (born February 11, 1934 in Hewlett, New York) is an American writer. As a literary editor, he championed many American authors, particularly Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Rick Bass, and Richard Ford. He is the father of the novelist Atticus Lish.

Early life and family

Lish was raised in Hewlett, New York on Long Island; his father was a partner in Lish Brothers, a millinery firm. During his formative years, he suffered from extreme psoriasis and was often ostracized by his peers. He attended Phillips Academy but left without graduating following an altercation with an antisemitic classmate in 1952. He took a job as a radio broadcaster for WEIL in New Haven, Connecticut, under the pseudonym of Gordo Lockwood and continued to correspond with Carruth, who introduced Lish to the Partisan Review. In November 1956, Lish married Loretta Frances Fokes; they would go on to have three children.

After Carruth advised him to attend college, Lish matriculated at the University of Arizona, mainly because the climate ameliorated his psoriasis. He majored in English & German and clashed with creative writing instructor Edward Loomis, an adherent of the New Criticism who routinely disparaged Lish's more idiosyncratic influences, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac. Nevertheless, Lish completed his degree in two years with honors, graduating in 1959.

Following Lish's college graduation, the family moved to San Francisco; here Lish experienced the last vestiges of the San Francisco Renaissance and completed a teaching credential at San Francisco State University in 1960. Following another move to Burlingame, California, he took a position as an English teacher at Mills High School in Millbrae, California, where he joined a new Pacific Coast avant-garde literary journal, Chrysalis Review, edited by the San Francisco writer, John Herrmann. When Herrmann left the magazine, Lish took it over, and eventually it evolved into Genesis West.

Carver edits

In August 1998, three years after Carol Polsgrove described Lish's heavy editing of Raymond Carver's Neighbors and published a facsimile page showing the editing, The New York Times Magazine published an article by D. T. Max about the extent of Lish's editing of Carver's short stories which was visible in manuscripts held at the Lilly Library. Carver wrote Lish: “If I have any standing or reputation or credibility in the world, I owe it to you.” In December 2007, The New Yorker published an earlier and much longer draft of Carver's story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" under Carver's title, "Beginners." The magazine published Lish's extensive edits of the story on its web site for comparison. In May 2010 Giles Harvey wrote an article in the New York Review of Books reviewing Carver's work, and made the observation, "The publication of 'Beginners' has not done Carver any favors. Rather, it has inadvertently pointed up the editorial genius of Gordon Lish." Conversely, Stephen King in The New York Times described Lish's influence as 'baleful' and heartless, singling out the story 'The Bath' as 'a total re-write' and 'a cheat'. In 2013, David Winters wrote a profile of Lish for The Guardian, arguing that the widely publicized association with Carver had distorted Lish's reception, drawing attention away from the formal and stylistic innovation of his own fiction and from the achievements of his students.

Legacy

Lish has placed his papers and manuscripts, some 80,000 items dating from 1951 to 2012, at the Lilly Library of Indiana University. In 2015, Lish appointed the English literary critic David Winters as his authorized biographer.

Teaching and influence

He retired from teaching fiction writing in 1997 but came out of retirement to teach during the summers of 2009 and 2010 at the Center for Fiction in Manhattan.

Criticism

Students of Lish's Columbia University workshop "Tactics of Fiction" have described it with such adjective as "grueling," "hellish" and "sadistic," punctuated by Lish's constant interruptions of "This is entirely self-serving!" and "That's not what I want to hear. That won't help me live or die. It doesn't tell me anything about human truth." They have also called him "an unbelievably crazy, manipulative, egomaniacal person." One student told Spy magazine, "It was like some ghastly form of torture. To have to sit there listening to this self-indulgent egotists interrupting and insulting everybody. Really, there was not a moment of interest or enjoyment." Lish has also acquired a reputation as "a tireless name dropper, given to opening his mail in class and boasting about the lengths to which people will go to get his attention."

Carla Blumenkranz noted in The New Yorker, "Lish—who taught and edited young writers from the 1970s through the '90s, editing fiction at Esquire and Knopf and teaching at universities and private apartments—asked students to write to seduce him, and when female students succeeded he often took them to bed. Once he became an editor at Knopf he often bought his students' work as well, sometimes midsemester and sometimes, or so it seemed, midclass. So in two ways his workshop extended beyond the established boundaries of the classroom: if he really liked what you were doing, he might sleep with you, or he might publish your book."

Lish himself has criticized a number of prominent authors and literary institutions. Among his comments are that "Philip Roth is full of shit," Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Lethem do not deserve their reputations, Lydia Davis is "ridiculously overrated," "I cant read Paul Auster anymore," the redesign of The New Yorker was a "dreadful error" and the literary magazine n+1 is a "crock of shit."

Select English bibliography

• A Man's Work, New York : McGraw-Hill, (1967), OCLC 5855822
• All Our Secrets are The Same, New York : Norton, (1976), ISBN 0-393-08748-4 LCCN 76040486 OCLC 2425115
• Arcade, or, How to write a novel, New York : Four Walls Eight Windows, (1998), ISBN 1-56858-115-7 LCCN 98026693
• Collected Fictions, New York : OR Books, (2010), ISBN 978-0-9842950-5-0
• Dear Mr. Capote, New York : Holt, Rinehart & Winston, (1983), ISBN 0-03-061477-5 LCCN 85026276
• English Grammar, Palo Alto, Ca.: Behavioral Research Laboratories, (1964) OCLC 11328343
• Epigraph, New York : Four Walls Eight Windows, (1996), ISBN 1-56858-076-2 LCCN 96019753
• Extravaganza, New York : Putnam, (1989), ISBN 0-399-13417-4 LCCN 88028146 OCLC 18463582
• Goings, New York : OR Books, (2014), ISBN 978-1-939293-33-6
• Krupp's Lulu, New York : Four Walls Eight Windows, (2000), ISBN 1-56858-154-8 LCCN 99086329 OCLC 43324258
• Mourner at the door, New York : Penguin Books, (1988), ISBN 0-14-010680-4 LCCN 88031663
• My Romance, New York : Norton, (1991), ISBN 0-393-03001-6 LCCN 90024142 OCLC 22766592
• New Sounds in American Fiction, Menlo Park : Cummings Pub. Co. (1969), LCCN 68058434 OCLC 4102981
• Peru, New York : E.P. Dutton, (1986), ISBN 0-525-24375-5 LCCN 85013015 OCLC 12216053
• Self-imitation of Myself, New York : Four Walls Eight Windows, (1997), ISBN 1-56858-098-3 LCCN 97013200 OCLC 36713172
• The Secret Life of Our Times, Garden City : Doubleday, (1973), ISBN 0-385-06215-X LCCN 73080734 OCLC 754648
• The Selected Stories of Gordon Lish, Toronto : Somerville House Pub., (1996), ISBN 1-895897-74-2 OCLC 35927592
• What I Know so far, New York : Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, (1984), ISBN 0-03-070609-2 LCCN 83012980 OCLC 9830715
• Why Work, Palo Alto, Ca.: Behavioral Research Laboratories, (1966), OCLC 62726395
• Zimzum, New York : Pantheon, (1993), ISBN 0-679-42685-X LCCN 93003360 OCLC 27769736
• Peru, Dalkey Archive Press (2013) ISBN 978-1564788023

Awards

• A Guggenheim Fellowship
• The O. Henry Prize
• The Antioch Review 2005 Awards for Distinguished Prose

References

1. ^ "Personal Details for G Lish, 'United States Public Records, 1970–2009'". FamilySearch. Retrieved June 20, 2014.
2. ^ Lilly Library Manuscript Collections. "LISH MSS". Lilly Library Manuscript Collections. Retrieved November 12, 2013.
3. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6423/the-art-of-editing-no-2-gordon-lish
4. https://nplusonemag.com/issue-12/essays/captain-midnight/
5. Polsgrove, It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, But Didn't We Have Fun?, p. 242.
6. D.T.Max (August 9, 1998). "The Carver Chronicles". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved November 11, 2013.
7. ^ Harvey, Giles (May 27, 2010). "The Two Carvers". New York Review of Books. Retrieved May 19, 2010.
8. King, Stephen (November 19, 2009). "Raymond Carver's Life and Stories". The New York Times.
9. Winters, David (August 29, 2013). "Gordon Lish: famous for all the wrong reasons". The Guardian.
10. "Writing Classes". The Center for Fiction. 2010.
11. https://books.google.com/books?id=IQ_TRFid5NMC&pg=PA40&dq=%22Leon+wieseltier%22+spy&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDgQ6AEwBWoVChMIgcrN8IjjxwIVQVU-Ch33sw7z#v=onepage&q=%22Leon%20wieseltier%22%20spy&f=false
12. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/seduce-the-whole-world-gordon-lishs-workshop
13. http://www.newsweek.com/2014/06/27/angry-flash-gordon-255491.html
14. http://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/gordon-lish/

External links

• Bess, Donovan, "The Man Who Taught Too Well", Nation Magazine, June 15, 1963
• Raymond Carver's story "Beginners " and Gordon Lish's edits of the story to create its published version, entitled "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love."
• Radio interview with Michael Silverblatt and Gordon Lish in Bookworm on December 12, 1993

• 20th-century American novelists
• 21st-century American novelists
• American book editors
• American magazine editors
• American male novelists
• American male journalists
• American literary critics
• Minimalist writers
• O. Henry Award winners
• Writers from New York
• Writers from Arizona
• Writers from California
• Phillips Academy alumni
• University of Arizona alumni
• 1934 births
• Living people
• Jewish American novelists
• People from Hewlett, New York
• Guggenheim Fellows
• American male short story writers
• 20th-century American short story writers
• 21st-century American short story writers