William T. Vollmann

William T. Vollmann
Born	July 28, 1959 (1959-07-28) Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	novelist, journalist, short story writer, essayist
Nationality	American
Period	1987–present
Genres	Literary fiction, historical fiction
Subjects	War, violence, science, human compassion
Influences Comte de Lautréamont, Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Leo Tolstoy

William Tanner Vollmann (born July 28, 1959 in Los Angeles, California) is an American novelist, journalist, short story writer, essayist and winner of the National Book Award. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife and daughter.

Biography

Vollmann studied at Deep Springs College, then earned a B.A., summa cum laude, in comparative literature at Cornell University.

In his youth, Vollmann's younger sister drowned while under his supervision, a tragedy for which he felt responsible. This experience, according to him, influences much of his work.

After graduation, Vollmann went on to the University of California, Berkeley, on a fellowship for a doctoral program in Comparative Literature. He dropped out after one year with the intention of engaging in life instead of just studying. He worked odd jobs, including as a secretary at an insurance company, and saved up enough money to go to Afghanistan in 1982. His experiences traveling with the mujahideen formed the basis of his first non-fiction book An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World which was not published until 1992. Upon his return to the USA he worked as a computer programmer, despite having virtually no experience with computers. According to a New York Times Magazine profile by novelist Madison Smartt Bell, he spent the better part of a year there writing his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, after hours on office computers, subsisting on candy bars from vending machines and hiding from the janitorial staff.

He has written for Harper's, Playboy, Conjunctions, Spin Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, Gear, Granta, and sometimes contributes to The New York Times Book Review among other publications. Vollmann has called himself a "hack journalist" and his travel writing and reportage are often done during research for his fiction or non-fiction projects, giving it a hybridized and journalistic feel.

In November 2003 (after many delays) McSweeney's published Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,300-page, heavily illustrated, seven-volume treatise on violence which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A single-volume condensed version was published at the end of the following year by Ecco Press, an abridgment he justified by saying, "I did it for the money." Rising Up and Rising Down represents over 20 years of work and attempts to establish a moral calculus to consider the causes, effects, and ethics of violence. Much of it consists of Vollmann's own reporting from places wracked by violence, among them Cambodia, Somalia, and Iraq.

Vollmann's other works often deal with the settlement of North America (as in Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, a cycle of seven novels), or stories of people (often prostitutes) on the margins of war, poverty, and hope. His 2005 novel Europe Central follows the trajectories of a wide range of characters (including Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich) caught up in the fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union, and won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction.

In 2008, he was awarded a five-year fellowship/grant from the Strauss Living Award, that gives writers of note $50,000 a year, tax free. In 2010, Vollmann published a critical study of Japanese Noh Theater, entitled Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater.

Vollmann is currently writing a collection of erotic love stories (one of which, "Widow’s Weeds", was published in AGNI #66 in 2007) and the fourth and fifth volumes of the Seven Dreams series. In interviews, he has mentioned a book about abortion called The Shame of Our Youth as well as a study on rape cases in court.

Vollmann's papers were acquired by the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of Ohio State University.

Full-length critical essays have been published in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, BookForum, Open Letters Monthly, and Science Fiction Studies. In 2010, the German magazine 032c dedicated 40 pages of its 19th issue to Vollmann, and featured a rare interview with the author in addition to reprinted texts.

Michael Hemmingson co-edited, with Larry McCaffery, Expelled from Eden: A WTV Reader (NY: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004) and published William T. Vollmann: A Critical Study and Seven Interviews (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co) in 2009.

Theses and dissertations

• Andersen, Allen S. William T. Vollmann: An Annotated Bibliography. San Diego State University, 1996.
• Soloff, Edward. Transformations in "Seven Dreams: a book of North American Landscapes" by William T. Vollmann University of New York at Stony Brook, 1999.
• Lybarger, Jeremy. Black & White: The Violent Humor of William T. Vollmann's The Rainbow Stories. New York University, 2008.

Bibliography

Novels & Collections

• You Bright and Risen Angels (1987)
• The Rainbow Stories (1989) (collection)
• 13 Stories and 13 Epitaphs (1991) (collection)
• The Atlas (1996) (collection)
• Europe Central (2005)

The Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes Cycle

• The Ice-Shirt (1990) (Volume One)
• Fathers and Crows (1992) (Volume Two)
• Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (2001) (Volume Three)
• The Rifles (1994) (Volume Six)

The "Prostitution Trilogy"

• Whores for Gloria (1991)
• Butterfly Stories: A Novel (1993)
• The Royal Family (2000)

Non-fiction

• An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (1992)
• Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means (2003)
• Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (2006) (Part of the "Great Discoveries" series)
• Poor People (2007)
• Riding Toward Everywhere (2008)
• Imperial (2009)
• Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater (2010)
• Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan (2011) (eBook)

Unpublished and Rare Works

• The Song of Heaven: Grammar and Rhetoric in Literature and Political Action (1981)
• The Convict Bird: A Children’s Poem (1988) (bound with steel plates)
• The Happy Girls (1990) (hand-painted and bound with metal plates, later included in 13 Stories and 13 Epitaphs)
• The Grave of Lost Stories (1993) (bound in steel and marble box, originally included in 13 Stories and 13 Epitaphs)
• Wordcraft: Hints and Notes (circa 2000) (writer's handbook)
• Burning Songs (circa 2000) (poems)
• The Book of Candles (1995-2008) (ten poems, in wooden box)

External links

• KCRW Bookworm Interview, November 4, 2004
• The Vollmann Club
• Alma Books author
• Profile of Vollmann in the New York Review of Books, December 2005
• McSweeney's Author Page
• TimeOut New York interview
• Review of Poor People [1] by Alexander Provan, published in the May 2007 issue of Stop Smiling magazine.
• KCRW Bookworm Interview, March 27, 2008, discussing Riding Toward Everywhere
• "Seeing Eye to Eye", Vollmann on ethics in photography, in Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2009
• Vollmann on Writing Poverty Review of Poor People by Nicolas Duvoux, published by La vie des idées, 02/27/09.
• Critical essay on Vollmann at Open Letters
• William Vollmann’s Burqa by Guy Reynolds, on Vollmann's "literary globalism."
• Madison Smartt Bell (Fall 2000). "William T. Vollmann, The Art of Fiction No. 163". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/620/the-art-of-fiction-no-163-william-t-vollmann.