Lewis Nordan, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Lewis Nordan

American writer

Date of Birth: 23-Aug-1939

Place of Birth: Forest, Mississippi, United States

Date of Death: 13-Apr-2012

Profession: writer, author, university teacher, novelist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Virgo


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About Lewis Nordan

  • Lewis Nordan (August 23, 1939 – April 13, 2012) was an American writer. Nordan was born to Lemuel and Sara Bayles in Forest, Mississippi, grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi.
  • He received his B.A.
  • at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, his M.A.
  • from Mississippi State University, and his PhD from Auburn University in Alabama.
  • In 1983, at age forty-five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair.
  • The collection established him as a writer in the Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O'Connor.
  • It also established a place for Nordan's fiction, the fictional Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, a small town in the Mississippi Delta based loosely on Nordan's hometown of Itta Bena. After the short-story collection The All-Girl Football Team (1986) followed Music of the Swamp (1991), a novel/short-story cycle featuring Nordan's spiritual alter ego, the young Sugar Mecklin, as the protagonist.
  • The book features aspects of magic realism that would become one of Nordan's trademarks, along with a peculiar mix of the tragic and the hilarious. Wolf Whistle (1993), Nordan's second novel, was both a critical and public success.
  • It won the Southern Book Award and gained him a wider audience.
  • The book deals with one of the most notorious racial incidents in recent Southern history: the murder of Emmett Till. The novel The Sharpshooter Blues (1995) is a lyrical meditation on America's gun culture, as well as another portrait of the grotesque lives in Itta Bena.
  • With the coming-of-age novel Lightning Song (1997), Nordan moved from Itta Bena to the hill country of Mississippi.
  • The novel still features Nordan's magic Mississippi realism, complete with singing llamas and poetic lightning strikes. In 2000, Nordan published a "fictional memoir," Boy With Loaded Gun. Before retiring in 2005, Lewis Nordan lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he taught Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh.

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