Robley Conant Wilson Jr. (1930 - )

Genre: General Fiction, Poetry

Robley Wilson, born in Brunswick, Maine, on 15 June 1930, is a short story writer, novelist, and poet, and was long-time editor (1968-2000) of The North American Review; he also taught in the English department at the University of Northern Iowa (Cedar Falls) from l963 until 2000. He graduated from Bowdoin College with honors in English in 1957 (receiving an honorary degree from same in 1987) and earned an MFA with distinction from the University of Iowa in 1968. He's married to fiction writer Susan Hubbard, English professor at the University of Central Florida (Orlando) and author of two short story collections, Blue Money (1999) and Walking on Ice (1990). Robley and Hubbard live now in Orlando and Cape Canaveral, Florida. More biographical info is available at Robley's website.

Wilson is the author of several short story collections:

• The Pleasures of Manhood: Stories (l977)
• Living Alone: Fictions (l978)
• Dancing for Men (l983), winner of the l982 Drue Heinz Literature Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press)
• Terrible Kisses (l989)
• The Book of Lost Fathers (2001)

He's also published three novels, The Victim's Daughter (1991), about a daughter's struggle to come to terms with her father's brutal murder, Splendid Omens (2004), about a man reconnecting with his first love, and The World Still Melting (2005).

His stories have also appeared in anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize III, Best American Short Stories of l979, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Fiction of the Eighties: A decade of stories from TriQuarterly, and The Ploughshares Reader: New Fiction for the Eighties. He contributed to Time and Chance: An Iowa Murder Mystery (1998), a serial novel by 17 Iowa writers. Three short stories -- "Flaggers," "Fathers," and "Barber" -- are available online.

Wilson's poetry collections include

• Family Matters (l980)
• Kingdoms of the Ordinary (l987), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press)
• A Pleasure Tree (l990), winner of the 1990 Society of Midland Authors poetry award
• Everything Paid For (1999)

Several of Wilson's poems are available online, including

• "In the Woodcock's Wake"
• "In summer, nothing happens" in the Dec. 1999 New Criterion
• "Alone in the House" in the June 2000 New Criterion
• "December in Florida " in the Sept. 2000 New Criterion
• "War"

Wilson has also edited some fiction anthologies, including Three Stances of Modern Fiction: A Critical Anthology (1972; with his former Bowdoin College professor and friend Stephen Minot); Four-Minute Fictions: Fifty Stories from the North American Review (1987), with very short stories by Raymond Carver, Jayne Anne Phillips, Barry Lopez, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Stephen Dixon, Pamela Painter, W. P. Kinsella, Doris Read, Diane Vreuls, etc; and 100% Pure Florida Fiction : An Anthology (2000; with his wife, Susan Hubbard).

An extensive Sept. 1990 interview with Wilson is online.


Last Update: 05/31/2007

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