Born August 13: Jonathan Strong

By the time he was twenty-five, Illinois native Jonathan Strong had graduated from Harvard, won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, had twice won O. Henry awards for his short fiction (including 3rd prize), and published his first book, Tike and Five Stories, winner of the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. (Rosenthal recipients just prior to his win were Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates; soon after him came Thomas McGuane, Alice Walker, and Richard Yates.) In the intervening forty-three years, Strong has published eleven more books. Two recent novels are the just terrific Drawn From Life (2008) and the Lammy finalist Consolation (2010). Both books' protagonists are out gay men, which may or may not contribute to why Strong is not as widely read as he ought to be; or it may simply be the unfair wheel of literary fate. Either way, he is overdue for his Barbara Pym moment of rediscovery. Last year he published his opera novel More Light, and his next novel, finished two years ago, Hawkweed and Indian Paintbrush, is still forthcoming from a very small press. A longtime lecturer at Tufts, he is happily partnered and lives without the internet or email in Rockport, Massachusetts.