Gail Godwin: Short Stories Gail Godwin

Early published work

According to The Asheville Citizen-Times, Godwin's first successful work was a 1969 short story in Cosmopolitan.[6] Her first published novel was her dissertation written as graduate work at University of Iowa. It was published in 1970 and called The Perfectionists.[3] The story was based loosely on Godwin's second marriage. It was accepted by Harper & Row in December 1968,[7] while Godwin completing her graduate work.[4] From 1971 on, Godwin earned a living through her work as a writer and augmented her income by means of intermittent teaching positions.[4]

After completing her graduate work in 1971, Godwin spent two months at the Yaddo artist's colony in Upstate New York in 1972. There she wrote 100 pages of a novel called The Villain, which was never published. The work was scrapped, but ended up being part of the basis for The Odd Woman.[4] According to author Jane Hill, it was while working on The Odd Women that Godwin transitioned from linear narratives to more complex structures where the plot interweaves past and present events.[3][4]

It was at Yaddo that Godwin met composer Robert Starer and began a life partnership with him that lasted until his death in 2001.[3][21] They moved to Stone Ridge, New York in 1973[18] and later built a house in Woodstock, New York, where Godwin continued her work from home.[3][21] In addition to her books and short stories, Godwin wrote libretti for ten of Starer's musical compositions.[3]

Height of Godwin's career

By 1976 Godwin was a successful writer and novelist who had published three books: The Perfectionists, Glass People, and The Odd Woman.[15] The Odd Woman was the longest and most widely recognized of the three.[6] Several short stories by Godwin were published in prominent magazines like Harper's Esquire, Ms. and The Paris Review, where she was often featured on the cover.[15] Godwin was awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1975–76) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1975–76).[1]

Throughout her career, Godwin worked consistently with her agent, John Hawkins, but worked with several different publishing houses.[22] Godwin's early books were published by Knopf.[22] After the editor for The Perfectionists, David Segal, died suddenly of a heart attack, Robert Gottlieb from Knopf became her editor for her next four books.[1][18] Godwin credits Gottlieb for much of the success of her early works.[7] Later on, when Godwin's then-recent books were less widely read, USA Today commented that this could be in part because she was no longer working with Gottlieb.[23] After Knopf, Godwin contracted with Viking, who offered larger advances and more publicity for her books.[18][24]

During the years 1982 to 1991, Godwin produced another collection of short fiction and four more novels.[1] According to Publishers Weekly, it was A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) and A Southern Family (1987) that substantially expanded her readership. These novels remained on bestseller lists for an extended period of time.[21] Godwin's earlier works had sold an average of less than 8,000 copies, while A Mother and Two Daughters sold more than 1.5 million.[4] It was the most popular of Godwin's early works[12] and the first time she had written a narrative from the point-of-view of multiple characters.[4][25] In 1987, Godwin was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for her work on The Southern Family.[26][27]

By the early 2000s, five of Godwin's books had made The New York Times Best Seller list and three were finalists for the National Book Award.[28][29][30]

Recent works

By 1999 Godwin had published ten novels.[31] In 2001, Godwin's partner, Robert Starer, died and she began writing a fictional story based on their life called Evenings at Five that was published two years later.[32] In November 2004 Godwin signed a contract with the publisher Ballantine Books for her next four books.[33]

According to Publishers Weekly, Godwin had "achieved a huge degree of success" and still had many devoted readers, but by 1999 she was "no longer the draw she once was."[22] By 2006 The Finishing School (1984) was her last major, commercially successful book, which was followed by a drop in readership.[23][29] According to Godwin, she was "one of the many authors to be caught in the tumult while [the publishing industry] thrashed about in search of a new business model."[24] The Los Angeles Times said her characters that were progressive working women in the 1970s and 1980s, were now considered "tame" in a modern context.[29]

Kirkus Reviews said Godwin had "a couple of subpar efforts," until publishing Queen of the Underworld in 2006.[32][34] Flora (2013) became one of her better selling books.[35] Godwin also authored an autobiography, Publishing that appeared in 2015.[7] The Los Angeles Times said her auto-biography was a "preemptive strike" after she was approached by an independent biographer.[29] As of 2015, Godwin's published works have included 14 novels, two collections of short stories, three non-fiction works, and ten libretti.[7]

Academia and other work

According to The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature, Godwin was unusual in that she was a popular novelist that was also working in academia.[36] Godwin taught at the University of Illinois Center for Advanced Studies from 1971 to 1972.[37] During her time as an author, she was also a lecturer at the Iowa Writers' Workshop (1972 to 1973), Vassar College (1977), and Columbia University (1978/1981).[4][12][36] She acted as chair of the fiction panel for the National Book Awards in 1986[4] and 2008.[38] In 1989, Godwin also founded a small publishing house called St. Hilda's Press. It published religious texts not printed by more commercialized publishers.[4][22] She later became a Distinguished Alumna of the University of North Carolina and the University of Iowa.[3]