Michael Martone (born August 22, 1955 in

Fort Wayne, Indiana Fort Wayne is a city in and the county seat of Allen County, Indiana, United States. Located in northeastern Indiana, the city is west of the Ohio border and south of the Michigan border. The city's population was 263,886 as of the 2020 Censu ...

) is the author of nearly 30 books and

chapbooks A chapbook is a small publication of up to about 40 pages, sometimes bound with a saddle stitch. In early modern Europe a chapbook was a type of printed street literature. Produced cheaply, chapbooks were commonly small, paper-covered booklet ...

. He was a professor at the Program in Creative Writing at the

University of Alabama The University of Alabama (informally known as Alabama, UA, or Bama) is a Public university, public research university in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Established in 1820 and opened to students in 1831, the University of Alabama is the oldest and la ...

, where he taught from 1996 until his retirement in 2020. Martone has won two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies.

Biography

Martone attended

Butler University Butler University is a private university in Indianapolis, Indiana. Founded in 1855 and named after founder Ovid Butler, the university has over 60 major academic fields of study in six colleges: the Lacy School of Business, College of Communic ...

and graduated from

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universit ...

. He holds an MA from the Writing Seminars of

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...

, where he studied under

John Barth John Simmons Barth (; born May 27, 1930) is an American writer who is best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include ''The Sot-Weed Factor'', a ...

. He has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at

Warren Wilson College Warren Wilson College (WWC) is a private liberal arts college in Swannanoa, North Carolina. It is known for its curriculum that combines academics, work, and service as every student must complete a requisite course of study, work an on-campus ...

, and has taught at

Iowa State University Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the n ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

Syracuse University Syracuse University (informally 'Cuse or SU) is a Private university, private research university in Syracuse, New York. Established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the university has been nonsectarian since 1920. Locate ...

and the University of Alabama. He lives in

Tuscaloosa Tuscaloosa ( ) is a city in and the seat of Tuscaloosa County in west-central Alabama, United States, on the Black Warrior River where the Gulf Coastal and Piedmont plains meet. Alabama's fifth-largest city, it had an estimated population of 1 ...

with his wife, the poet Theresa Pappas. The couple has two sons, both of whom are writers: Sam Martone and Nicholas V. Pappas."", ''Superstition Review'', Fall 2009. Aside from studying under and befriending John Barth, Martone also developed a close relationship with the writer

Thomas Pynchon Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. ( , ; born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, scie ...

while the two lived together in Brooklyn. It was later on, while teaching at Syracuse in the early 1990s, that Martone befriended a young

David Foster Wallace David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel '' Infinite Jest'', whi ...

and introduced to him a number of influential works, most notably

Lewis Hyde Lewis Hyde (born 1945) is a scholar, essayist, translator, cultural critic and writer whose scholarly work focuses on the nature of imagination, creativity, and property. Profile Hyde was born in Cambridge, MA. He is the son of Elizabeth Sanfor ...

's '' The Gift.''

Career

Martone's 2005 work, ''Michael Martone'', is an investigation of form and autobiography. It was originally written as a series of contributor's notes for various publications. One of his central interests is the "false biography" and the often blurry boundary between fact and fiction. He also considers himself a "neo-regionalist." The permeable boundary between fact and fiction is reflected in books like his 2001 ''The Blue Guide to Indiana'' which, as a disclaimer on the cover makes clear, "is in no way affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with the series of travel books titled ''

Blue Guide The Blue Guides are a series of detailed and authoritative travel guidebooks focused on art, architecture, and (where relevant) archaeology along with the history and context necessary to understand them. A modicum of practical travel informa ...

''," and "in no way factually depicts or accurately represents the State of Indiana." The disclaimer, Martone explains, was included after he received a cease and desist letter from the publisher of "the real Blue Guide." This letter in turn inspired the opening chapter of Martone's 2015 anthology, ''Winesburg, Indiana'', written in the form of a cease and desist letter from the fictional town of Winesburgcreated by the novelist

Sherwood Anderson Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and ...

which claims proprietary rights to “the distribution of Sadness, Fear, Longing, and Confusion itself. We have patented madness. We own Trembling. We extensively market Grief.“ Martone further obscured the line between fact and fiction in his 2020 book, ''The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne'', which was called "an ingenious reimagining of the real-life inventor of skywriting" by the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

''. Martone has devoted much of his career to disrupting and defamiliarizing the taken-as-given notions of order, ownership, and identity in his field, and has been described as literature's "most notorious mutineer." In 1988 his membership to the American Academy of Poets was briefly revoked after he published two books, one listed as "prose" and one as "poetry" which wereaside from the line-breaks in onecompletely identical to one another. His AWP membership has been revoked multiple times. In the late nineties, after reading

Neal Bowers Neal Bowers (born Larry Neal Bowers, August 3, 1948 in Clarksville, Tennessee) is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, and scholar. He received the B.A. (1970) and M.A. (1971) from Austin Peay State University and the Ph.D. in English and Ameri ...

' book of non-fiction, ''Words for the Taking,'' which describes the author's agonizing hunt for the person who has plagiarized his poems, Martone began to publish poetry under the pseudonym "Neal Bowers." "I am not using Bowers' poems," Martone later explained, "only the name. So when these poems get published, Neal Bowers could actually include them on his vita as far as I'm concerned. I hope he does ... I understand the theft of intellectual property that got Neal Bowers so worked up. But is it plagiarism to actually contribute to someone else's work? I am not stealing his work but actually donating my own to his store of work." According to Martone he has written under a number of ''nom de plumes'': "I've published fictional poems under the name Neal Bowers, fictional stories under the names Christian Piers, Jonah Ogles, Arin Fisher, Sarah Mignin, and Matthew Douglas McCabe, fictional nonfiction under the username zzxyzz n Wikipedia.org fictional advertisements under the name Klemm Co., and fictional songs with the band under the name AVALANCHE." Of this impulse, Martone has said "I’ve never really felt much like 'Michael Martone'—sometimes I think my entire life I’ve been wearing a costume. At some point I put it on to cope with things that Michael Martone was too weak to take on as himself. And after a while I forgot I was even wearing the costume. Now I can’t take it off. I’ve forgotten where the zipper is, and I’m stuck in it." Martone's work sometimes resembles, more so than traditional literature, performance and installation art. In his twenties, under the name Paul French, Martone self-published the book ''The Numberless,'' the sole copy of which exists within the confines of a rural shed in Fort Wayne, Indiana, nailed page by page to the walls, windows, and rafters, in a random, unnumbered order. More recently, he has been working on the sequel to this piece in an abandoned carton factory on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa. Martone has also written a number of fictional interviews with his mentor John Barth, as well as fictional advertisements in the margins of magazines such as

McSweeney’s McSweeney's Publishing is an American non-profit publishing house founded by Dave Eggers in 1998 and headquartered in San Francisco. Initially publishing the literary journal'' Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern'', the company has moved to n ...

Black Warrior Review ''Black Warrior Review (BWR)'' is a non-profit American literary magazine founded in 1974 and based at the University of Alabama. It is the oldest continuously run literary journal by graduate students in the United States. Published in print bi ...

and

Nashville Review ''Nashville Review'' is an online, MFA student-run literary magazine at Vanderbilt University. A triannual review, Nashville Review publishes fiction, poetry, comics, art, nonfiction, and performance art videos. Past contributors include A ...

Influences

In a 2007 interview with Fred Arroyo (now collected in ''Unconventions''), Martone provides a list of major influences, cataloguing figures not only from literary fiction but also popular musicians, visual artists, and television personalities, explaining that, to him it seems "the assumptions about influences often suggest the notion of a Gatsby-like program of improvement. The writer only reads 'good' books that contribute to his or her scheme of perfection ... Whatever I am up to as a writer has come about mainly by accident, inertia, and least resistance." Throughout other interviews, Martone reiterates a number of the same names and also mentions several others, occasionally expanding on why these writers are important for him. What follows is a partial list gleaned from these interviews. * Hugh Kenner * Roy Behrens *

Lawrence Weschler Lawrence Weschler (born 1952) is an author of works of creative nonfiction. A graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz (1974), Weschler was for over twenty years (1981–2002) a staff writer at ''The New Yorker'', w ...

Chuck Jones Charles Martin Jones (September 21, 1912 – February 22, 2002) was an American animator, director, and painter, best known for his work with Warner Bros. Cartoons on the ''Looney Tunes'' and ''Merrie Melodies'' series of shorts. He wrote, produ ...

Cindy Sherman Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. Her breakthrough work is often co ...

Yma Sumac Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo (September 13, 1922 (birth certificate) or September 10, 1922 (later documents) – November 1, 2008), known professionally as Yma Sumac (), was a Peruvian-American coloratura soprano. She was one ...

* Raymond Loewy *

Tom Waits Thomas Alan Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American musician, composer, songwriter, and actor. His lyrics often focus on the underbelly of society and are delivered in his trademark deep, gravelly voice. He worked primarily in jazz during ...

Mister Rogers Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003), commonly known as Mister Rogers, was an American television host, author, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was the creator, showrunner, and host of the preschool television se ...

Captain Kangaroo ''Captain Kangaroo'' is an American children's television series that aired weekday mornings on the American television network CBS for 29 years, from 1955 to 1984, making it the longest-running nationally broadcast children's television program ...

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris ...

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J. G. Ballard James Graham Ballard (15 November 193019 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, satirist, and essayist known for provocative works of fiction which explored the relations between human psychology, technology, sex, and mass med ...

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Works

*''At a Loss'', 1977 (prose poems) * ''Alive and Dead in Indiana'', 1984 (fiction) *''Return to Powers'', 1985 (nonfiction) *''Safety Patrol'', 1988 (fiction) *''A Place of Sense: Pieces of the Midwest'', 1988 (editor) * ''Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List'', 1990 (fiction) *''Townships: Pieces of the Midwest'', 1992 (editor) *''Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List evised and Expanded', 1992 (fiction) *''Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle'', 1994 (fiction) *''Seeing Eye'', 1995 (fiction) *''The Flatness and Other Landscapes'', 1999 (nonfiction) *''The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: Fifty North American American Stories Since 1970'', 1999 (editor, with Lex Williford) * * (contributor) *''Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists'', 2003 (editor, with Robin Hemley) * *''Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art'', 2005 (nonfiction) *''Night Terrors: An Introduction to Zombigaze'', 2006 (meta-biography) *''Rules of Thumb: 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations'', 2006 (editor) *''Double-Wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone'', 2007 (fiction) *''Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction'', 2007 (editor, with Lex Williford) *''Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins'', 2008 (nonfiction) *''Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fictions from the Flyover'', 2009 (editor) * * * * * *''The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne'', 2020 ("editor") *

Awards

*The Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, for ''Flatness and Other Landscapes'', University of Georgia Press (1998) *The Indiana Author's Award (2013) *The Mark Twain Award by The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (2016) *The 2022 Druid Arts Award for literary educator, The Arts and Humanities Council of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. *The Truman Capote Prize For Distinguished Work in the Short Story or Literary Non-Fiction (2023), the Monroeville Literary Festival.

References

External links

*
Interview at HTMLGIANT

Biography at Web Del Sol

Interview at The Quarterly Conversation

Detailed bibliography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Martone, Michael 20th-century American novelists 21st-century American novelists American male novelists Writers from Fort Wayne, Indiana 1955 births Living people 20th-century American male writers 21st-century American male writers Novelists from Indiana 20th-century American non-fiction writers 21st-century American non-fiction writers American male non-fiction writers