Andre Dubus

Andre Dubus
Born	Andre Jules Dubus II (1936-08-11)August 11, 1936 Lake Charles, Louisiana
Died	February 24, 1999(1999-02-24) (aged 62) Haverhill, Massachusetts
Occupation	Short story writer novelist teacher
Period	1967–1998
Genre	Literary fiction
Spouses	Patricia Lowe (1958-1970)[1] Peggy Rambach[2] (1979-1989)
Children	6

Andre Jules Dubus II (August 11, 1936 – February 24, 1999) was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays.^[3]

Andre Jules Dubus II was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the youngest of three children of Katherine (née Burke) and André Jules Dubus, in a Cajun-Irish Catholic family. The author James Lee Burke is his first cousin.^[4] Dubus grew up in the Bayou in Lafayette, Louisiana, and was educated by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order that emphasized literature and writing. Dubus graduated from nearby McNeese State College in 1958 as a journalism and English major.

Dubus then spent six years in the Marine Corps, rising to the rank of captain. During this time, he married his first wife and started a family. After leaving the Marine Corps, Dubus moved with his wife and four children to Iowa City, where he later graduated from the University of Iowa's Iowa Writers' Workshop with an MFA in creative writing, studying under Richard Yates. The family then moved to Haverhill, Massachusetts, where Dubus would spend the bulk of his academic career teaching literature and creative writing at Bradford College.^[5]

Dubus is identified as a Catholic writer, and as a southern writer, as he carried his heritage as a Louisiana Catholic throughout his life. His influences included Ernest Hemingway, Anton Chekhov, and John Cheever.^[6]

His short stories are recognized for their realism and humanism, their multi-dimensional characters and their complex view of the human condition. He is admired for his storytelling craft and his attention to tangible detail. His themes include the complicated sexual politics of the Catholic Church, and his subject matter falls roughly into the categories of childhood and youth; stories of military life; violence, revenge, and forgiveness; and fathers, marriage, and divorce.

Throughout his career, Dubus published most of his work in literary journals such as Ploughshares^[7] and the Sewanee Review, though he also placed stories in magazines such as The New Yorker and Playboy. Dubus remained loyal to the small publishing firm Godine until the end of his career, when medical bills forced him to switch to Alfred A. Knopf.

Dubus's life was marked by several tragedies. The rape of his daughter caused Dubus many years of paranoia over his loved ones' safety.^[8] Dubus carried personal firearms to protect himself and those around him, until the night in the late 1980s, when he almost shot a man who was in a drunken argument with his son outside a bar in Haverhill.^[9]

On July 23, 1986, Dubus was driving from Boston to his home in Haverhill and stopped to help two people at the scene of an accident. A third vehicle hit the three of them. Dubus' back was broken and both his legs were crushed.^[10] After a series of operations, his right leg was amputated above the knee, and he eventually lost the use of his left leg.

To help Dubus with mounting medical bills, his friends and fellow writers Ann Beattie, E.L. Doctorow, John Irving, Gail Godwin, Stephen King, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Yates held a special literary benefit in Boston and raised $86,000.

Despite his efforts to walk with a prosthesis, chronic infections led to him using a wheelchair for the remainder of his life, and he battled clinical depression. Over the course of these struggles, his wife left him, taking with her their two young daughters.

Dubus eventually continued to write after his accident and produced two books of essays, including Broken Vessels, which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and a collection of short stories. Dubus also conducted a weekly writers' workshop in his home.

Andre Dubus was married twice and fathered six children. His son Andre Dubus III is also an author who, in 2011, published a memoir, Townie, which tells of growing up in Haverhill and his relationship with his father.

Dubus died of a heart attack at his home in Haverhill in 1999, at age 62. He is buried in nearby Greenwood Cemetery.

Short Story Collections

• Separate Flights (1975)
• Adultery and Other Choices (1977)
• Finding a Girl in America (1980)
• The Times Are Never So Bad (1983)
• The Last Worthless Evening (1986)
• Selected Stories (1988)
• Dancing After Hours (1996)
• In the Bedroom: Seven Stories (2002)

Novels and novellas

• The Lieutenant (1967)
• We Don’t Live Here Anymore (1984)
• Voices from the Moon (1984)

Non-fiction

• Broken Vessels (1991)
• Meditations from a Movable Chair: Essays (1998)

• Review of Voices from the Moon, John Updike, The New Yorker 1985^[11]
• "Poised for Fame: Andre Dubus at Fifty", Joseph J. Feeney, America Magazine 1986
• "Andre Dubus: From Detached Incident to Compressed Novel", Steve Yarbrough, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 1986
• "Patterns of Sin and Grace: The Catholic Imagination of Andre Dubus", John B. Breslin, Commonweal Magazine 1988^[12]
• "True Confession: Andre Dubus Talks Straight", Ellen Lesser, The Village Voice 1989
• "Andre Dubus", Anne E. Rowe, Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South, Greenwood Press 1993
• "Andre Dubus: Never Truly Members", Lucy Ferriss, Southern Writers at Century’s End, University Press of Kentucky 1997
• "Jumping from One Heart to Another: How Andre Dubus Writes About Women", Madone Miner, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 1997
• "An Interview with Andre Dubus", David Yandell Todd, The Yale Review 1998
• "The Complicated Catholicism of Andre Dubus", Michael Cocchiarale, Songs of the New South: Writing Contemporary Louisiana 2001
• Andre Dubus: Tributes, Donald Anderson, Xavier Review Press 2001
• Leap of the Heart: Andre Dubus Talking, Ross Gresham, Xavier Review Press 2003^[13]
• Inclusion in Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Charles E. May, Salem Press 2004
• Bodwell, Joshua (July–August 2008). "The Art of Reading Andre Dubus: We Don't Have to Live Great Lives". Poets & Writers.
• Conversations with Andre Dubus, Olivia Carr Edenfield (ed.), University Press of Mississippi 2013
• Understanding Andre Dubus, Olivia Carr Edenfield, University of South Carolina Press 2017^[14]
• Analysis of Andre Dubus’s Stories, Nasrullah Mambrol, Literary Theory and Criticism 2020^[15]

In 2018, Godine published all Dubus' fiction produced between the mid-1970s and late 1980s in three volumes: We Don't Live Here Anymore: Collected Short Stories & Novellas, Volume 1, The Winter Father: Collected Short Stories & Novellas, Volume 2, and The Cross Country Runner: Collected Short Stories & Novellas, Volume 3.

Italian writer and editor Nicola Manuppelli has translated six collections of short stories and novellas by Dubus for Italian publisher Mattioli 1885: "Separate Flights" ("Voli separati"), "The Times Are Never So Bad" ("I tempi non sono mai così cattivi"), "Voices From The Moon" ("Voci dalla luna"), "We Don't Live Here Anymore" ("Non abitiamo più qui"), "Finding a girl in America" ("Il padre d'inverno") "Dancing After Hours" ("Ballando a notte fonda"). For the publication of these works, Manuppelli has included introductions or afterwords by several American authors, including Dennis Lehane, Peter Orner, and Tobias Wolff, among others.

The Dubus story "Killings" was adapted into Todd Field's 2001 film In the Bedroom.

The 2004 movie We Don't Live Here Anymore is based upon two of Dubus's novellas, "We Don't Live Here Anymore" and "Adultery".

Several writing awards are named after Dubus. His papers are archived at McNeese State University and Xavier University in Louisiana and at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

• L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award (for debut collection Separate Flights), 1975
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1976
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1986
• Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1988
• MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 1988
• PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, 1991
• Pulitzer Prize, Nominee (for nonfiction, Broken Vessels), 1992
• National Book Critics Circle Award, Finalist (for fiction, Dancing After Hours), 1996
• Rea Award for the Short Story, 1996

Wikiquote has quotations related to Andre Dubus.

• Ravin, Richard (1999-03-18). "Remembering Andre Dubus". Salon.
• "Symposium on Andre Dubus and Andre Dubus III". Saint Anselm College. Archived from the original on 2012-09-10. Retrieved 2011-03-23.