John Rechy

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John Rechy
Born John Francisco Rechy
(1931-03-10) March 10, 1931 (age 93)
El Paso, Texas
Occupation Novelist, essayist
Nationality American
Alma mater
Texas Western College
Period 1963–
Notable works City of Night
The Sexual Outlaw
The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez
Military career
Allegiance United States
Service/branch  United States Army
Rank Private
Website
johnrechy.com

John Francisco Rechy (born March 10, 1931) is a Mexican American novelist, essayist, memoirist, dramatist and literary critic. In his novels he has written extensively about homosexual culture in Los Angeles and wider America, among other subject matters, and is among the pioneers of modern LGBT literature. His debut novel City of Night, published in 1963, was a best seller and is widely considered a seminal work in 20th century literature. Drawing on his own background, he has contributed to Chicano literature, notably with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which has been taught in several Chicano literature courses throughout the United States.

Background

Rechy was born March 10, 1931 in El Paso, Texas.[1][2][3] He was the youngest of five children born to Guadalupe (née Flores) and Roberto Sixto Rechy.[4] Both of Rechy's parents were natives of Mexico, his father was of Scottish lineage.[2][5][6]

He earned a B.A. in English from Texas Western College (now University of Texas at El Paso), where he served as editor of the college newspaper.[4]

Following graduation from college, Rechy enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was granted early release from the Army to enroll as a graduate student at Columbia University.[7] He applied for admission to a creative writing class taught by novelist Pearl S. Buck by submitting an unpublished novel he had written titled "Pablo!"[8] While his application to Buck's class was not accepted, Rechy was admitted into the writing classes of Hiram Haydn, a senior editor at Random House, at the New School for Social Research.[8]

Literary career

Rechy's first published work, the largely autobiographical novel City of Night, debuted in October 1963. Despite the predominantly negative reviews the book received at the time of its publication, City of Night became an international bestseller. It is now widely recognized as a "modern classic"[4][9][10]

In addition to the dozen novels he has written to date, Rechy has contributed numerous essays and literary reviews to various publications including The Nation, the The New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, L. A. Weekly, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Evergreen Review and Saturday Review.[4][5] Many of these writings were anthologized in his 2004 publication Beneath the Skin. He has written three plays, Tigers Wild (first performed as The Fourth Angel and based on Rechy's novel of that title), Rushes (based on his novel of the same title), and Momma As She Became—Not As She Was, a one-act play.[4]

Rechy was cited, by journalist Amy Harmon, in a 2004 New York Times article that reported about a computer glitch on Amazon.com that suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews. It was revealed that Rechy, among several other authors, had "pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon's highest rating" Amazon consequently stopped accepting anonymous reviews as a result of this finding.[11]

Awards, honors and recognition

Rechy is the first novelist to receive PEN-USA-West's Lifetime Achievement Award (1997); he is the recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle (1999)[7][12][13] and an NEA fellow. He is a faculty member at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. He is the first recipient of ONE Magazine Culture Hero Award.[14]

Legacy

Writers Michael Cunningham,[15] Kate Braverman, Sandra Tsing Loh, and Gina Nahai were students of Rechy's creative writing classes before becoming published authors.[10]

English pop artist David Hockney's painting Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles was inspired by a passage in City of Night.[16]

The 1983 song "Numbers" by the English synthpop duo Soft Cell was inspired by Rechy's 1967 novel of the same title.[17]

A CD-ROM of Rechy's life and work was produced by the Annenberg Center of Communications and is titled: Mysteries and Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy.[18]

Bibliography

Novels

Non-fiction

References

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. NOTE: Although many literary encyclopedias and biographies published in the 1960s through the 1990s list Rechy's year of birth as 1934, most such publications released since that period list the birth year as 1931. The latter is consistent with the year stated in the official Texas birth records, and Rechy himself has acknowledged 1931 as his birth year.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Harmon, Amy "Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers", The New York Times, February 14, 2004. Retrieved March 31, 2014.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

Further reading

  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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