Richard Gustave Stern (February 25, 1928 – January 24, 2013) was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator. Stern was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

on February 25, 1928. He attended the

University of North Carolina The University of North Carolina is the multi-campus public university system for the state of North Carolina. Overseeing the state's 16 public universities and the NC School of Science and Mathematics, it is commonly referred to as the UNC S ...

from which he graduated

Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal ...

and

magna cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sou ...

in 1947. After a year working in Indiana, Florida and New York City, he went to

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 highe ...

where he received an MA in English Literature. In 1949, he taught as a

Fulbright Scholar The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people o ...

in Versailles, France. From 1950 to 1951 he was an assistant professor and taught at

Heidelberg University } Heidelberg University, officially the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, (german: Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg; la, Universitas Ruperto Carola Heidelbergensis) is a public research university in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, ...

. From 1952 to 1954, he was a member of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and received a PhD from the

University of Iowa The University of Iowa (UI, U of I, UIowa, or simply Iowa) is a public research university in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. Founded in 1847, it is the oldest and largest university in the state. The University of Iowa is organized into 12 co ...

in 1954. After a year teaching at

Connecticut College Connecticut College (Conn College or Conn) is a private liberal arts college in New London, Connecticut. It is a residential, four-year undergraduate institution with nearly all of its approximately 1,815 students living on campus. The college w ...

in New London, he came to the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

where he taught from 1955 to 2002. He retired as Helen A Regenstein Professor of English and American Literature in 2004. During his tenure at the University of Chicago, Stern was allegedly involved in the "suppression" of the "beat edition" of the ''Chicago Review'' (winter edition of 1958). At the time the ''Chicago Review'' was a student/faculty literary publication published by the University of Chicago. The editor then was Irving Rosenthal. The "beat edition" of the ''Review'' was to include excerpts from ''

Naked Lunch ''Naked Lunch'' (sometimes ''The Naked Lunch'') is a 1959 novel by American writer William S. Burroughs. The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes, intended by Burroughs to be read in any order. The reader follows the na ...

'', by William S. Burroughs, and a few

Jack Kerouac Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian an ...

stories. According to Rosenthal, Stern, along with Joshua Taylor, another faculty member, wanted to suppress the winter issue, being himself "so quick to protect the administration." (For reference to the case of censorship See ''The Beats, A Literary Reference'', by Matt Theado, pp. 103, 104, 105, under the chapter titled "The ''Chicago Review'' and a Case of Censorship.") Stern's own account of the "so-called suppression" appeared in "How I Think I Got to Think the Way I Think" in ''The Republic of Letters'' (reprinted in ''Still on Call'', Stern's "orderly miscellany"). It recounts Stern's successful attempt not only to save the review (the University President at the time, Lawrence A. Kimpton, wished to stop funding the journal) but to keep the following issue from dropping any of the pieces (of ''Naked Lunch'' and other "beat" works) that had been accepted. Rosenthal and Paul Carroll, the ''Review'''s co- editors, founded ''Big Table'', using submissions which Stern and the other student editors claimed belonged to the ''Review''. (Oddly, Stern was invited to and did read at a fund-raiser for ''Big Table'' and published what he read in its second issue.) Furthermore, the previous issue of the ''Review'' included an excerpt from ''Naked Lunch'' along with work by other Beats. In 1960, Stern published his first novel, ''Golk,'' then the novels ''Europe or Up and Down with Baggish and Schreiber'' (1961), ''In Any Case'' (1962), ''Stitch'' (1965), ''Other Men's Daughters'' (1973), ''Natural Shocks'' (1978), ''A Father's Words'' (1986), and ''Pacific Tremors'' (2001). There also have been short story collections culminating in his collected stories, ''Almonds to Zhoof'' published in 2004, his 21st book. Of this last book, a reviewer in the New Republic called Stern "the best American author of whom you have never heard." This indeed has been the tag associated with Mr. Stern for the last quarter of a century. "I was a has-been before I'd been a been," was a well-known self-deprecation as was the word of Richard Schickel that Mr. Stern "was almost famous for not being famous". Stern published another collection of essays, What is What Was, in 2002. Like his other essay collections, this one demonstrates that his astute observations in fiction are equal to, and derived from, his acute views on news and culture. In 1985, Stern received the Medal of Merit for the Novel, awarded to a novelist every six years by the

American Academy of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqu ...

. Among his many other awards was the Heartland Award for the best work of non-fiction which Stern received for his memoir, ''Sistermony,'' published in 1995. Stern has been praised by many of the great writers and critics of the last fifty years, among them

Anthony Burgess John Anthony Burgess Wilson, (; 25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993), who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer and composer. Although Burgess was primarily a comic writer, his dystopian satire ''A Clockwork ...

Flannery O'Connor Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern literature, Southe ...

Howard Nemerov Howard Nemerov (March 1, 1920 – July 5, 1991) was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. For ''The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov'' (1977) ...

, Thomas Berger,

Hugh Kenner William Hugh Kenner (January 7, 1923 – November 24, 2003) was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor. He published widely on Modernist literature with particular emphasis on James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett. His majo ...

Sven Birkerts Sven Birkerts (born 21 September 1951) is an American essayist and literary critic. He is best known for his book ''The Gutenberg Elegies'' (1994), which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other te ...

, and Richard Ellmann, as well as his close friends Tom Rogers,

Saul Bellow Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 July 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only w ...

Donald Justice Donald Rodney Justice (August 12, 1925 – August 6, 2004) was an American teacher of writing and poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980. In summing up Justice's career, David Orr wrote, "In most ways, Justice was no different from a ...

, and

Philip Roth Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophicall ...

(see Stern's essay "Glimpse, Encounter, Acquaintance, Friendship" in Sewanee Review, Winter 2009). He also enjoyed literary acquaintances and friendships with such figures as

Samuel Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and Tragicomedy, tr ...

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

Robert Lowell Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (; March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the '' Mayflower''. His family, past and present, were important subjects ...

Lillian Hellman Lillian Florence Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway, as well as her communist sympathies and political activism. She was blacklisted aft ...

, and

Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, as well as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known b ...

. Some of Stern's students at the University of Chicago went on to become distinguished writers themselves such as

Douglas Unger Douglas Arthur Unger (born June 27, 1952) is an American novelist. Life and work Unger was born in Moscow, Idaho. He received a BA from the University of Chicago in 1973 and a MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 19 ...

Robert Coover Robert Lowell Coover (born February 4, 1932) is an American novelist, short story writer, and T.B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. Background ...

, Austin Wright, Campbell McGrath, Peter LaSalle, and Alane Rollings, as well as the well-known journalists

Seymour Hersh Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Investigative journalism, investigative journalist and political writer. Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam Wa ...

, David Brooks and

Mike Taibbi Mike Taibbi (born c. 1949) is an American television journalist best known for his work at NBC News. He retired in 2014, having covered, among other events, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his career, Taibbi also worked at CBS News. He ...

. At 80, Stern continued to write, and his books remain in print through Northwestern University Press and University of Chicago Press. From 2006 onwards he maintained a blog with The New Republic. The most recent book about Stern and his work was published in 2001: ''The Writings of Richard Stern: The Education of an Intellectual Everyman'', by David Garrett Izzo (McFarland Publishing). See also James Schiffer's study, ''Richard Stern'', published by Twayne/Macmillan in 1993.

External links

References

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Stern, Richard G 1928 births 2013 deaths Deaths from cancer in Georgia (U.S. state) 20th-century American novelists 21st-century American novelists American male novelists Harvard University alumni Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni Writers from New York City American male short story writers 20th-century American short story writers 21st-century American short story writers 20th-century American male writers 21st-century American male writers Novelists from New York (state)