Wilton Brad Watson (July 24, 1955 – July 8, 2020) was an American author and teacher of creative writing. Originally from Mississippi, he worked and lived in Alabama, Florida, California, Boston, and Wyoming. He was a professor at the University of Wyoming from 2005 until his death in 2020. In his lifetime Watson published four books – two novels and two collections of short stories – to critical acclaim. His fifth (posthumous) book is There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories (July 2024).
After working as a newspaper reporter and editor and at an advertising agency, he returned to the University of Alabama to teach creative writing; he also worked for the university's public relations department.[3] While at Alabama he published Last Days of the Dog-Men (1996), which had taken him ten years to write and won him the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and The Great Lakes New Writers Award.[4] Amy Grace Lloyd, writing for The New York Times twenty years later, called it "a near-perfect story collection".[5] In 1997 he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University until 2002.[6] He was a writer in residence at the University of West Florida, the University of Alabama, the University of Mississippi, and the University of California, Irvine. Beginning in 2005, he taught at the University of Wyoming,[3] where he was a professor of creative writing and literature in the Department of Visual & Literary Arts.[7]
Watson's 2002 novel The Heaven of Mercury was a finalist for the National Book Award.[8] His 2010 collection of short stories Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives received positive reviews in The New York Times[8] and the Boston Phoenix;[9] its stories contained "divorces, miscarriages, an argument that ends in bungled gunplay, a joint-custody visitation, even a touch of incest", and Watson himself considered some of them some of the funniest stuff he'd ever written.[10] His work has appeared in The New Yorker.[11] The book was a finalist for The PEN/Faulkner Award in 2011. Two years later, Watson received the Award in Letters from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.[12]
His 2016 novel Miss Jane is set in Depression-era Mississippi; its main character, Jane Chisolm, is inspired by one of his great-aunts, a woman with an unknown (to family survivors) urogenital condition that rendered her incontinent and possibly made her incapable of having vaginal sex. Watson has stated in interviews that he could not write the book until he found a medical condition that would seem to fit what little family survivors knew and remembered about his great-aunt's condition. The novel was praised by critics,[13][14][15][16][5] with Silas House saying it "takes Watson's writing to new heights".[4] The novel was one of ten books long-listed for The National Book Award in Fiction in 2016. It was an ebook bestseller on Amazon.com in 2020.[17]
Subject matter and style
Watson is frequently called a Southern writer, and acknowledged his heritage and his love for family and friends, particularly after moving to Wyoming in 2005.[6] At community college in Meridian, he became inspired by William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Flannery O'Connor.[18] He is praised for his portrayal of Southern issues and problems (racism and segregation being one of the subject matters of Heaven of Mercury), but commented also on stereotypical simplifications of the South in other parts of America:
For all the ways [the South] is struggling and, yes, deficient, or failing, flailing, it is also a place full of wonderful people, and possibly one of the most diverse places in the country. Not that everyone gets along. There is ignorance, there is racism. There are also more proud people trying to change that than might be apparent from the results at the polling booths. But writing the book, I was just thinking about these people, trying to make them real people in the reader’s mind. Here’s an anecdote, though. I was at a tea party or the like at a famous university in the early stages of researching Miss Jane, and I asked the host--who was a pediatrician, for goodness sake--if he could speculate on what might have been my great aunt’s condition. His response was, "You're from Mississippi, right? Is there any history of incest in your family?"[4]
Furman, Laura, ed. (2011). "Alamo Plaza". PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011: The Best Stories of the Year. Random House Digital, Inc. ISBN978-0-307-80594-2.
