This month, I’ve selected Gail Godwin as our featured author with a June birthday.
Goodwin is an American novelist and short story writer. She’s written fourteen novels, two short story collections, three non-fiction books, and ten libretti.
She was born in Alabama on June 18, 1937, while her parents were visiting relatives. She was raised in North Carolina. Her parents divorced when she was two, and Godwin was raised by her mom and grandmother.
Godwin’s mother Kathleen had a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, so she was the breadwinner for the family and Godwin’s grandmother was in charge of childcare and housekeeping duties. Kathleen taught college-level English in the mornings and worked for the local newspaper in the evenings. In her free time, Kathleen wrote love stories for magazines in New York. She was unsuccessful in finding a publisher for her plays and novels.
According to Godwin, being raised by two strong women greatly influenced her work, but by age five, she identified more with her mom’s career than her grandmother’s. She wrote her first short story when she was nine.
In 1948, Kathleen remarried. She eventually made the decision to be a stay-at-home mom, and gave up her ambitions of becoming a writer. Her new husband worked in sales and the family moved often.
Godwin had no relationship with her biological father until they reconnected when he attended her high school graduation. He later offered to pay for her college education. For the first two years, she attended Peace College in Raliegh, North Carolina. She transferred to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in her junior year and moved in with her father. Later that year, he died by suicide. Godwin’s uncle and half-brother also died by suicide.
While in college, she worked on one of her mother’s unpublished novels, The Otherwise Virgins, but was unable to find a publisher. One of Godwin’s original novels, Windy Peaks, was rejected by an agent from Knopf Publishing who was on campus looking for undiscovered young talent. After watching her mother struggle to establish a writing career, Godwin seemed determined to be successful for her mother as well as for herself.
Godwin graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and went to work for the Miami Herald where she worked as a journalist for one year. Douglas Kennedy was a photographer and co-worker at the newspaper. Godwin and Kennedy married in 1960 and divorced several months later. Godwin was a hard worker, but she was fired because her editors didn’t feel her writing reflected the journalistic style they wanted for a fact-based newspaper. She often concentrated on the human-interest angle of her stories instead of sticking to “who, what, when, and where.”
Stinging from her divorce and firing, she accepted a position in London from 1961-1965 working for the U.S. Travel Service run by the American Embassy. She was relegated to a receptionist position, but her easy workload allowed Godwin to read in her free time. She completed Gull Key while working in London. Her main character was a woman trying to decide if marriage and motherhood were the correct choices for her. Several publishers rejected her manuscript. Her work was lost when she sent her only copy of the manuscript to a publishing company that went out of business and did not return her manuscript.
Godwin met Ian Marshall, her second husband in London while taking a creative writing course. Marshall was a psychiatrist. They married two months later, but the marriage ended in divorce a short time later.
After the divorce, Godwin returned to the United States and took a job as a fact-checker in New York City for the Saturday Evening Post. Godwin hated her job. She felt it was embarrassing to fact check other people’s instead of working on her own writing.
After a distant uncle died and left her a small inheritance, she used the money to apply to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and moved to Iowa after being accepted into the program. While at the University of Iowa, she met her teacher and future mentor, Kurt Vonnegut. Godwin taught English at the University of Iowa while earning her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature. Her dissertation became her first novel, The Perfectionists.
By 1976, she was a successful writer with three published novels. From 1980-1990, Godwin’s work was highly acclaimed and popular. She had many loyal fans who stayed with her during the 1990s, when her stories about independent woman struggling to find their place in society were considered too tame. In 2006, Queen of the Underworld was published to rave reviews, and it was a major success. Flora, written in 2013, became one of her most commercially successful works.
Most of Godwin’s works are about relationships and women struggling with familial and societal expectations and thwarted ambitions. Her primary themes are gender roles and southern settings though she dislikes being categorized.
Godwin lived with Austria-born American composer, pianist, and educator, Robert Starer for over thirty years until his death in 2001. The two collaborated on several librettos. Godwin lives in Woodstock, New York.
Happy Birthday Gail Godwin!
Works by Gail Godwin:
Novels:
The Perfectionists (1970)
Glass People (1972)
The Odd Woman (1974)
Dream Children (1976)
Violet Clay (1978)
A Mother and Two Daughters (1982)
Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1983)
The Finishing School (1984)
A Southern Family (1987)
Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991)
The Good Husband (1994)
Evensong (1999)
Evenings at Five (2003)
Queen of the Underworld (2006)
Unfinished Desires (2009)
Flora (2013)
Grief Cottage (2017)
Other Works:
The Southern Belle (1975)
Being on Everybody’s Side (1979)
Becoming a Writer (1980)
Becoming the Characters in Your Own Novel (1982)
Introduction to the Best American Short Stories (1985)
Heart: A Personal Journal through its Myths and Meanings (2001)
The Making of a Writer (2006)
Publishing a Writer’s Memoir (2015)
Images of Gail Godwin:
Image 1:
By Robert Starer - Provided directly by Gail Godwin, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44230802
Image 2:
By Photograph © Martin Brading: http://www.martinbrading.com/, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49059174