Celebrating Stephen Dixon

Stephen Dixon (1936-2019) grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with six siblings. Before he became a college professor at the age of 43, he lived a life, working as a school bus driver, a bartender, a systems analyst, an artist’s model, a middle school teacher, a department store clerk, and a reporter in Washington, D.C., where he interviewed John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev, and L.B.J., among others.

He wrote his first short story in 1959 and attributed to his older brother, Jim, a fiction writer, the best advice he had ever gotten: “You have to finish them.” Which advice, having subsequently written over 500 short stories, he decidedly took. His first published short story, “The Chess House,” appeared in The Paris Review in 1963 (#29). He taught at Johns Hopkins University for 27 years. He published 18 novels and 17 short story collections. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment of the Arts grants. He was also a two-time National Book Award nominee—for his novels Frog and Interstate—and his work was selected for four O. Henry Prizes, two Best American selections, three Pushcart Prizes, one Best Stories of the South, two stories in the Norton Anthology of American Literature and possibly others he was too modest to list. He hammered out his fiction on a vintage typewriter. He passed away on November 6th, 2019, at the age of 83.