His protagonists don’t simply move through a story from discreet beginning to resolved end instead, they tend to pace back and forth, in and around and over their troubles-picking off scabs, licking wounds to see how they taste.ĭixon was born Stephen Ditchik on June 6th, 1936, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the fifth of seven children whose grandparents had emigrated from the Pale of Settlement in Poland.
Dixon’s work achieves its particular visceral effects by dispensing with traditional narrative structure. The critic Michael Silverblatt once said that Dixon “attempts to render reports of unbearable experience.” Indeed, Dixon spent the last decade of his life writing about the illness and eventual death of his beloved wife-the translator, Russian scholar, and poet Anne Frydman, who lived with multiple sclerosis for over 25 years-and then about his own struggles living with Parkinson’s disease.
And for 27 years, he was a professor in the storied Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, where he taught Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Porochista Khakpour, ZZ Packer, David Lipsky, Esi Edugyan, Fred Leebron, and many others.ĭixon’s work was not only formally adventurous, but also deeply personal, drawing heavily from his own experiences and often dealing with life’s least palatable aspects. But his willingness to play with narrative structure restricted his popular appeal, even as it influenced a generation of contemporary fiction writers, many of whom have gone on record to say so (Jonathan Lethem, Julia Alvarez, Daniel Handler, and Dave Eggers are among them). The last two of his 35 books (18 novels and 17 short story collections) appeared last year, and he continued writing until his last weeks, hammering away on his manual typewriter with, as he wrote in a letter to longtime friend and literary critic Jerome Klinkowitz, “the two good fingers Parkinson’s has left me.”ĭixon’s work earned many accolades, including multiple O’Henry Awards, Pushcart Prizes, and appearances in the Best American Short Stories anthologies, as well as one nomination for the PEN/Faulkner Award and two for the National Book Award (in 1995, he lost to Philip Roth). In his six-decade career, he published well over 600 short stories.
Dixon-who passed away at the age of 83 on November 6th, 2019, after a brief illness related to Parkinson’s disease-was among the most innovative fiction writers of his generation.
WHEN STEPHEN DIXON DIED late last year, American literature lost an underappreciated master.
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