The Stories of J.F. Powers

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J. F. POWERS (1917–1999) was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, and studied at Northwestern University while holding a variety of jobs in Chicago and working on his writing. He published his first stories in The Catholic Worker and, as a pacifist, spent thirteen months in prison during World War II. Powers was the author of three collections of short stories and two novels—Morte D’Urban, which won the National Book Award, and Wheat That Springeth Green—all of which have been reissued by New York Review Books. He lived in Ireland and the United States and taught for many years at St John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.

DENIS DONOGHUE is University Professor at New York University, where he holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters. He is the author of many books, including Connoisseurs of Chaos, Reading America, We Irish, and Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls.

HE WAS James Farl Powers on his birth certificate and Jim Powers to his friends. In the history of modern fiction J. F. Powers (1917–1999) was a distinctive figure, a loner, emerging from quietness every few years when he published a book or won a prize, but otherwise content to mind his own professional business. He is sometimes described as a writer’s writer, meaning that he was an artist too good to gratify the most casual reader, but he was also a reader’s writer, if we assume a reader who thinks of fiction as intelligent art rather than low entertainment. Such writers tend not to be abundant, they work hard on their sentences.

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