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Andre Dubus
Born	August 11, 1936(1936-08-11) Lake Charles, Louisiana, United States
Died	February 24, 1999 (aged 62) Haverhill, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	novelist, short story writer, teacher
Nationality	American
Period	1967-1998
Genres	Literary fiction
Influenced Andre Dubus III influenced = Jay Sheckley

Andre Dubus (August 11, 1936 Lake Charles, Louisiana - February 24, 1999) was an American short story writer, essayist, and autobiographer. He is recognized as one of the best American short-story writers in the 20th century.^[1]

Biography

Andre Dubus was the oldest child of a Cajun-Irish Catholic family. His surname is pronounced "Duh-BYOOSE", with the accent on the second syllable to rhyme with the noun "excuse." Dubus grew up in the Bayou country in Lafayette, Louisiana and was educated by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic parochial school 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, eventually rising to the rank of captain. At 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. He loved the spareness of Hemingway, the perfect quandary which is Chekhov, and the luminous human mystery found in Cheever. He loved his children up close and his exwives from afar. He loved cigarettes and artichokes and lime gimlets. He loved honor, he enjoyed teaching, he savored finishing his five pages; he was made whole by running.^[2]

Dubus's life was scarred by tragedy. His sister was raped as a young woman, causing Dubus many years of paranoia over his loved ones' safety. Dubus carried personal firearms to protect himself and those around him, until the night in the late 1980s, when he almost shot a man in a drunken argument outside a bar in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Dubus experienced a personal tragedy late on the night of July 23, 1986, when he was seriously injured in a car accident. He was driving from Boston to his home in Haverhill, Massachusetts and he stopped to assist two disabled motorists—brother and sister Luis and Luz Santiago. As Dubus assisted the injured Luz to the side of the highway, an oncoming car swerved and hit them. Luis was killed instantly; Luz survived because Dubus had pushed her out of the way. Dubus himself was critically injured. As a result of the accident, both Dubus's legs were crushed. His left leg had to be amputated above the knee, and Dubus would eventually lose the use of his right leg. Dubus would spend three painful years undergoing a series of operations, and extensive physical therapy. Despite his efforts to walk with a prosthesis, chronic infections confined him to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. Dubus continued to battle the physical pains imposed by his condition, and with clinical depression. The circumstances were terrible. It may be that the ability to feel anger is what kept them each alive, but the marriage foundered. Over the course of these struggles Dubus's third wife, a newly unemployed editor and young mother who had herself become seriously depressed, was also failing to write. She left him, taking with her their two young daughters, his "babies". Unable to run, to write, to sleep, without his "three girls" he was heartbroken.

To help Dubus with his mounting medical bills and wheelchair ramps for his new life, and contribute something he hoped to his children, Andre's friends and fellow writers, Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike held a special literary benefit. Dubus was extremely grateful, and his appreciation extended to holding workshops and reading sessions for aspiring writers. Despite these physical, psychological, and emotional difficulties, Dubus continued to write, producing two books of essays and a collection of short stories. He also conducted a weekly writers' workshop in his home, meeting with a group of young writers, a few of whom were former students and many of whom were teenage girls in a residential program for abused adolescents.

Dubus also found a deeper religious faith at this time. A practicing Catholic all his life, Dubus found that the loss of his mobility drew him closer to God, and renewed his Catholic faith at a deeper, personal level. Those who knew him admired the peace and acceptance he had achieved, as well as his ability to live his life without bitterness or self-pity.

Dubus spent his later years in Haverhill, until his death from a heart attack in 1999, at age 62. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery, near where he lived, in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He married three times, and fathered six children. His son Andre Dubus III is also an author, whose most noteworthy book is the novel House of Sand and Fog (1999), a finalist for the National Book Award. The novel was later filmed.

Writing career

Although he did write one novel, The Lieutenant, in 1967, Dubus considered himself to be and is mainly known as a writer of short fiction. Throughout his career, he published most of his work in small but distinguished literary journals such as Ploughshares^[3] and Sewanee Review, yet as the decades rolled by his stories appeared in well paying slicks, such as The New Yorker. Andre remained loyal to a small publishing firm run by David R. Godine that published his first works. Indeed he married his editor, and it is noted in library author biographies that her effects deepened his work. She fought his ideal of perfectly expressed Checkhovian doom. Even in a short story or novella she felt a character could change, learn or somehow could wrest something out of his suffering. She called it redemption. She had something there, and she changed him just a bit and for the better. Eventually even Playboy was buying his serious fiction. They did for years, until some apparently unforgivable faux pas came between him and celebrated fiction editor Alice K Turner. Without this well-paying market, even though his editor had left (he'd taken her with him) when larger book publishers approached him with more financially-rewarding deals, Dubus stayed with Godine. Only in the last few years of his life, when his medical bills became substantial, that Dubus switched publishers, moving to Alfred A. Knopf.

Dubus's literary career was extensive. His collections include: Separate Flights (1975), Adultery and Other Choices (1977), Finding a Girl in America (1980), The Times Are Never So Bad (1983), Voices from the Moon (1984), The Last Worthless Evening (1986), Selected Stories (1988), Broken Vessels (1991), Dancing After Hours (1996), and Meditations from a Movable Chair (1998). His writing awards include the PEN/Malamud, the Rea Award for the Short Story for excellence in short fiction, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. Several writing awards are named after Dubus. His papers are archived at McNeese State University and Xavier University in Louisiana.

Cinematic adaptations

After Dubus's death, his story "Killings" was adapted into Todd Field's In the Bedroom (2001) starring Sissy Spacek, Tom Wilkinson, and Marisa Tomei . The film was nominated for five Academy Awards – Best Picture, Actor in a Leading Role (Wilkinson), Actress in a Leading Role (Spacek), Actress in a Supporting Role (Tomei), and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Published (Robert Festinger & Field).

The 2004 movie, We Don't Live Here Anymore is based upon two of Dubus' novellas, "We Don't Live Here Anymore" and "Adultery." ^[4]

Bibliography

• The Lieutenant (novel, 1967)
• Separate Flights (stories, 1975)
• Adultery and Other Choices. 1977. http://books.google.com/books?id=rih4OVgp_O4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Andre+Dubus&cd=10#v=onepage&q=Andre%20Dubus&f=false.  (reprint David R. Godine Publisher, 1999, ISBN 9780879232849)
• Finding a Girl in America. David R. Godine Publisher. 1980. ISBN 9780879233938. http://books.google.com/books?id=LlwI_0rUh6YC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Andre+Dubus&cd=9#v=onepage&q=Andre%20Dubus&f=false. 
• The Times Are Never So Bad (stories, 1983)
• Voices from the Moon (novella, 1984)
• The Last Worthless Evening (stories, 1986)
• Selected Stories (stories, 1988) reprint Vintage Books, 1996 ISBN 9780679767305
• Broken Vessels. David R. Godine Publisher. 1991. ISBN 9780879239480. http://books.google.com/books?id=7G4r5T_rINoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Andre+Dubus&lr=&cd=11#v=onepage&q=Andre%20Dubus&f=false.  (essays, reissue 1992)
• Dancing After Hours (stories, 1996) A.A. Knopf, ISBN 9780679431077
• Meditations from a Moveable Chair (essays, 1998)
• In the Bedroom (stories, 2001) ISBN 9781400030774

Reviews

• Updike, John (4 February 1985). "Books: Ungreat Lives". The New Yorker 60 (51): 94–101.  Review of Voices from the Moon.
• Joshua Bodwell (July/August 2008). "The Art of Reading Andre Dubus: We Don’t Have to Live Great Lives". Poets & Writers. http://www.pw.org/content/art_reading_andre_dubus_we_don%E2%80%99t_have_live_great_lives. 

References

External links

• "Remembering Andre Dubus", Salon, Richard Ravin, 3/18/1999
• "SYMPOSIUM ON ANDRE DUBUS AND ANDRE DUBUS III", Saint Anselm College

From Wikiquote

Andre Dubus (1936-08-11 – 1999-02-24) was an American short story writer, essayist, novelist and autobiographer.

Sourced

Broken Vessels (1991)

• Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
  • Under the Lights

• Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak’s Broadway to Chicago.
  • Railroad Sketches

• These women, like writers, have no time clocks to punch, no waiting boss. I write in the morning before teaching, and neither these women nor I care about the morning commuter traffic. There is no place we have to be. We already are where we have to be, facing ourselves. Both of us, without the prodding of a paycheck or the loss of a job, face only time itself, and our responsibility to use it as best we can.
  • Of Robin Hood and Womanhood

• Very early, I understood that women were required to be other than what they were.
  • Of Robin Hood and Womanhood

• ...and I believed that everyone but those kneeling in front of me saw, and that was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
  • The Judge and Other Snakes

• ...my belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality.
  • On Charon’s Wharf

• Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it.
  • Into the Silence

• Living in the world as a cripple allows you to see more clearly the crippled hearts of some people whose bodies are whole and sound. All of us, from time to time, suffer this crippling. Some suffer it daily and nightly; and while most of us, nearly all of us, have compassion and love in our hearts, we cannot of will not see these barely visible wounds of other human beings, and so cannot or will not pick up the telephone or travel to someone’s house or write a note or make some other seemingly trifling gesture to give to someone what only we, and God, can give: an hour’s respite, or a day’s, or a night’s; and sometimes more than respite: sometimes joy.
  • A Woman in April

Selected Stories (1995)

• For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.
  • A Father's Story

External links

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Andre Dubus