Finding The Lost Country, The Life of William Gay by J.M. White
William Gay is one of this century’s greatest American writers and Michael White has done Gay’s enduring legacy a great service in this outstanding biography. –Ron Rash, New York Times bestselling novelist
William Elbert Gay was born in Lewis County, Tennessee in 1939 and grew up in the rural South. William was raised in a sharecropper’s shack without electricity or running water. His father never owned a car or a house. He graduated from the Lewis County High School but was completely self-educated as both a writer and a painter. For years he studied the craft and art of writing and kept at his writing until his prose matched the aesthetic power and intensity of the great writers in the Southern literary tradition he admired. He passed away in 2012 at age 71.
About
The biography is based on extensive interviews with William’s family and friends. It includes episodes from William’s fiction that were autobiographical and have been paraphrased and included in the biography in italics. These passages have been footnoted to reference them to their sources in his books. In this way, the biography was a collaboration with the writer himself. The biography has appendices that include an interview with William, copies of his correspondence with Cormac McCarthy, a photo gallery of pictures of William and his family, examples of paintings, and unpublished excerpts from his archive showing the evolution of his style as a writer along with a bibliography and filmography.
