William Gay b. October 27, 1943 d. February 23, 2012 Lewis County, TN

1. William Gay b. October 27, 1943 d. February 23, 2012 Lewis County, TN

2. Born in Lewis County, the son of Bessie and Arthur Gay, a sharecropper who also worked at area sawmills. William became a voracious reader at age 12, and began writing at age 15. Graduated from Lewis County High, and joined the U.S. Navy which promised an opportunity to travel. Served a four year tour as a radar operator, his ship making stops in Japan and Vietnam. William returned home in 1965 and found work at a drive-in movie theater near Decatur, Alabama, built pinball machines in Chicago, and was employed at a cardboard box factory in New York. He returned to Lewis County in 1968, and lived there until his death in 2012. William Gay BIOGRAPHY

3. Between 1968 and his success as a writer, William worked construction as a painter, carpenter, and dry wall hanger. He continued during that time to write but had no success publishing because he did not know how the game was played. In 1998, William began sending short stories to literary magazines published by universities, rather than to the big publishing houses and national magazines. Almost immediately, two of his short stories were purchased, one by The Georgia Review and another by The Missouri Review. Soon, editors were contacting him and asking about his other work, including novels. For the last years of his life, William concentrated on his writing & painting. William Gay BIOGRAPHY

4. In a 2001 interview, William said of that time period before he began publishing: “I’ve always felt sort of like in-between things. Like I fit in when I was working construction. I more or less could do my job. I didn’t get fired. I got paid. I could do it. But it was always sort of like working undercover. “Now when I’m meeting academic people and going to these things they have, basically it’s still the same thing. I’m still undercover. “Then, I was sort of a closet intellectual passing as a construction worker. Now, I’m a construction worker passing as an academic. I don’t belong in either place, really.” William Gay BIOGRAPHY

5. William did not like commas, saying they “retard the forward motion of a sentence.” He also did not use quotation marks, a style he picked up from novelist Cormac McCarthy, one of his major influences. William won the Michener award for fiction, and a 2007 Ford Foundation Grant for U.S. Artists, of $50,000. He also wrote extensively about music for national magazines, including Oxford American and Paste. He left two unfinished novels, The Lost Country and The Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train, enough unpublished short stories for a second collection, and a novella, Little Sister Death (published September 2015).