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Gordon Lish (born February 11, 1934) is an American writer. As a literary editor, he championed many American authors, particularly Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Rick Bass, Tom Spanbauer, and Richard Ford. He is the father of the novelist Atticus Lish.
After Frances advised him to attend college, Lish matriculated at the nearby University of Arizona. He majored in English and German and clashed with creative writing instructor Edward Loomis, an adherent of the New Criticism who routinely disparaged Lish's more idiosyncratic influences, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac. Nevertheless, Lish completed a cum laude degree in two years, graduating in 1959.
Following Lish's graduation, the family moved to San Francisco. During this period, Lish experienced the last vestiges of the San Francisco Renaissance and completed a teaching credential at San Francisco State University in 1960. Following another move to Burlingame, California, he took a position as an English teacher at Mills High School in Millbrae, California, where he joined a new Pacific Coast avant-garde literary journal, Chrysalis Review, edited by the San Francisco writer, John Herrmann. When Herrmann left the magazine, Lish took it over, and eventually it evolved into Genesis West.
The outré nature of Genesis West incensed school board officials, and Lish was denied tenure in 1963; two fellow teachers left in protest, and the kerfuffle was covered by The Nation. After refusing a fellowship at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a teaching position at Deep Springs College, Lish became editor-in-chief and director of linguistic studies at Behavioral Research Laboratories in Menlo Park, California. There, in 1964, he produced English Grammar, a text for educators; Why Work, a book of interviews; New Sounds in American Fiction, a set of recorded dramatic readings of short stories; and A Man's Work, an information motivation sound system in vocational guidance. It consisted of over 50 translucent albums.
While in Menlo Park, one of Lish's friends was Raymond Carver, who was then intermittently employed as an editor and public relations director at Science Research Associates, located across the street from Lish's office. Lish edited a number of stories that wound up as Carver's first national magazine publications.
It was at Esquire that Lish's aggressive editing of Carver's "Neighbors" in 1971 created the minimalist effect for which he was later known, as Carol Polsgrove pointed out in her 1995 book, It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, But Didn't We Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties. Polsgrove wrote, "On several pages of the twelve-page manuscript, fewer than half of Carver's words were left standing. Close to half were cut on several other pages." While Carver accepted Lish's editorial changes, other writers (including close friends such as DeLillo, who pulled a planned excerpt from the forthcoming Great Jones Street in September 1972 because of Lish's expurgations) resisted. Wrote Paul Bowles, "I fail completely to understand the meaning of the suggestions, or of the story as it incorporates them."Carol Polsgrove, It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, But Didn't We Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties (W.W. Norton, 1995), pp. 241–243.
While at Esquire, Lish edited the collections The Secret Life of Our Times and All Our Secrets Are the Same, which contained pieces by a number of prominent authors, from Vladimir Nabokov to Milan Kundera.
In February 1977, Esquire published "For Rupert – with no promises" as an unsigned work of fiction: this was the first time it had published a work without identifying the author. Readers speculated that it was the work of J. D. Salinger, but it was in fact a clever parody by Lish, who is quoted as saying, "I tried to borrow Salinger's voice and the psychological circumstances of his life, as I imagine them to be now. And I tried to use those things to elaborate on certain circumstances and events in his fiction to deepen them and add complexity."
After leaving Yale in 1980, Lish continued teaching creative writing as an adjunct professor at Columbia University and New York University, inspiring writers such as Amy Hempel; Hempel would later dedicate her collection Reasons to Live to him.Amy Hempel, Reasons to Live (HarperCollins, 1985). Garielle Lutz also dedicated Stories in the Worst Way (first published in 1996 by Alfred A. Knopf) and I Looked Alive (first published in 2003 by Four Walls Eight Windows) to Gordon Lish. Experimental minimalist V.O. Blum is indebted to Lish for having lauded an early novelette "Sperm Boy" in 1994; Blum went on to win kudos for a later novella, DownMind.
Pamela Ryder dedicated Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories and A Tendency to Be Gone: Stories to Lish.
Other writers who give thanks to Lish in books published by him at Alfred A. Knopf include Brian Evenson, Noy Holland, Patricia Lear, Dawn Raffel and Victoria Redel ( Where the Road Bottoms Out).
In Holland's thanks, she writes, "Greatest thanks to Gordon, captain in all weather."Noy Holland, The Spectacle of the Body: Stories (Dzanc Books, 1994). In Sam Lipsyte's Venus Drive, Lipsyte gives thanks to "especially Gordon Lish," his former teacher.Sam Lipsyte, Venus Drive (Open City Books, 2000).
During his time at Knopf, Lish wrote several books of his own fiction which were published by New York imprints:
In 1987, Lish founded and edited the avant garde literary magazine, The Quarterly, which showcased the works of contemporary authors. Six volumes were published by the summer of 1988. The Quarterly introduced such authors as J. E. Pitts, Jason Schwartz, Jane Smiley, Mark Richard, Bruce Holland Rogers, and Jennifer Allen. By the time The Quarterly ended in 1995, it had published 31 volumes.
Lish continued to write fiction, including Mourner at the Door in 1988, Extravaganza in 1989, My Romance in 1991, and Zimzum in 1993. For the June 1991 issue of Vanity Fair, James Wolcott wrote a profile on Gordon Lish and Don DeLillo called "The Sunshine Boys."
He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984.
Lish retired from teaching fiction writing in 1997 but came out of retirement to teach during the summers of 2009 and 2010 at the Center for Fiction in Manhattan. He also gave a series of lectures at Columbia University in 2013 and 2014.
Don DeLillo acknowledged Lish's influence as a teacher and friend in dedicating his book Mao II to Lish.Don DeLillo, Mao II (Penguin, 1992). Lish dedicated his books My Romance,Gordon Lish, My Romance (W. W. Norton, 1991). Mourner at the Door,Gordon Lish, Mourner at the Door (Penguin Books, 1988). and EpigraphGordon Lish, Epigraph (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996). to DeLillo. Lish also wrote an afterword to the publication of DeLillo's first play, The Engineer of Moonlight, in which he attacks those who would call DeLillo's vision bleak, stating, "Where we are and where we are going is where DeLillo is. He is our least nostalgic writer of large importance."Don DeLillo, The Engineer of Moonlight ( Cornell Review, 1979).
In a 2003 interview with The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Diane Williams said, “I studied with Gordon for two semesters in New York because I understood what he was offering—the special chance to become hugely conscious of how language can be manipulated to produce maximum effects. So often, in our naturally powerful speech, we only understand dimly how we are doing it, so that we are deprived of the good fortune of being in charge of it, rather than the other way around.”
He received an honorary doctor of letters from the State University of New York at Oneonta in 1994.
In Barry Hannah's short novel Ray, there is a character called Captain Gordon who is based on Lish,Barry Hannah, Ray (Penguin, 1987). and Lish appears as himself in Hannah's Boomerang.Barry Hannah, Boomerang (Houghton Mifflin, 1989).
David Leavitt's novel Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing documents the narrator's experiences under the tutelage of Gordon Lish. In the novel, Lish is the basis for the character of Stanley Flint, an enigmatic writing teacher.David Leavitt, Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing (Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
A former student of his longer classes said that "If you had weak boundaries, you were in trouble: a woman passed out cold in one class, an editor from Esquire threw up in another. If you considered yourself politically correct or any category of citizen ending in ist, you’d likely leave by the end of the first class. If you thought you could top Lish, you were in for a surprise. If you did, if you could, he would be the first person to jump to his feet and sing your praises uptown and down... You sat for six to eight hours without a stretch or a piss. You listened to the teacher and artist at work, while ignoring or forgiving the man. You accepted 12-gauge evisceration of your work and returned to the next meeting with something new, and you hoped better, to offer."
Carla Blumenkranz noted in The New Yorker that Lish "asked students to write to seduce him, and when female students succeeded he often took them to bed. Once he became an editor at Knopf he often bought his students’ work as well, sometimes midsemester and sometimes, or so it seemed, midclass. So in two ways his workshop extended beyond the established boundaries of the classroom: if he really liked what you were doing, he might sleep with you, or he might publish your book... Lish’s willingness to be bored and show it was one of his strengths as an instructor. He created a situation in which each student had to approach him, like a stranger at a party or a bar, to see if she could catch his attention. Lish shot down these nervous suitors one by one, not even bothering to hear out the pickup lines they fretted over. Then he shifted in an instant to a masculine role: talking endlessly, enacting his charisma, awing his listeners into submission."
Lish himself has criticized a number of prominent authors and literary institutions. Among his comments are that "Philip Roth is full of shit"; Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Lethem do not deserve their reputations; Lydia Davis is "ridiculously overrated"; "I can't read Paul Auster anymore"; the redesign of The New Yorker was a "dreadful error"; and literary magazine n+1 is a "crock of shit."
Story Collections
Anthologies (as Editor)
Audio Cassettes
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Gordon Lish's edits of the story to create its published version, entitled "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love."
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