James Carroll (author)

Writer

• Born: January 22, 1943
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

Biography

Born on January 22, 1943, in Chicago, Illinois, James Carroll spent his childhood just outside Washington, DC, where his father, Joseph Carroll, worked first for the FBI and then for the United States Air Force as the Head of Special Investigations. Joe Carroll and his wife, Mary Morrissey Carroll, eventually raised five sons. James, the second oldest, attended Priory School in Washington and an American high school in Wiesbaden, Germany, from 1958 to 1959 while his father served as Air Force Deputy Commander in Europe. Following a brief period at Georgetown University, James Carroll enrolled in 1962 at St. Paul’s College, the seminary of the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle (Paulist Fathers), where he earned both B.A. and M.A. degrees. In 1966, Carroll attended a summer writing program at the University of Minnesota, where he studied with poet Allen Tate, who encouraged his aspirations to become a writer. After he was ordained as a priest in 1969, Carroll divided his time between his duties as a chaplain at Boston University and his work for various Catholic publications.

His clerical life paralleled the years of the Vietnam War, a conflict that politically divided many American families, including Carroll’s own. While his father served as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, calculating enemy strength and recommending enemy targets, Carroll himself participated in antiwar protests, and his brother Dennis dodged the military draft. Carroll’s activism during this period and his renunciation of the priesthood in 1974 caused a rift between him and his father, a breach that was never mended. Carroll married novelist Alexandra Marshall in 1977, and together they raised two children, Elizabeth and Patrick.

Carroll’s career as a novelist took shape with the publication of his second novel, Mortal Friends, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1978. Focusing on the history of an Irish-Catholic family partially resembling his own, the best-selling book is set in Boston, Carroll’s adopted home. Much of Carroll’s fictional work is drawn from his personal life. His novel Secret Father (2005), for example, is set during the Cold War in Germany, where Carroll’s own family lived for a time because of his father’s high rank in the American military. In 1991, the year his father died, he published the novel Memorial Bridge, among whose principal characters are an Air Force general like his father and a draft dodger son like his brother Dennis. Carroll revisited this troubling family dynamic in 1996 with the publication of An American Requiem, a memoir about his father, mother, their five sons, and the family dissension informed, in part, by their individual responses to the war in Vietnam. The book won the National Book Award in nonfiction.

In 1992, Carroll started serving as an op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe; his newspaper commentary on contemporary events is informed by many of the same religious and moral concerns that enliven his fiction. In 2012 his Globe columns received the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award for Commentary. He has also published articles in several other prominent publications including the New York Times, New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Nation.

Carroll continued to publish nonfiction and some fiction in the 2000s and 2010s, much of which continued to grapple with themes of Catholicism and the American military establishment. Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (2001) became a New York Times Best Seller and won several awards including the National Jewish Book Award. Carroll subsequently wrote and produced a 2008 critically acclaimed documentary film based on the book. His other nonfiction titles include Toward a New Catholic Church (2004); Crusade: Chronicle of an Unjust War (2005); House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (2006), which won the first PEN-John Kenneth Galbraith Award; Practicing Catholic (2009); and Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (2011), which was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book. In 2014 Carroll published Warburg in Rome, a novel, and Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age, a nonfiction exploration of early Christianity and the rise of antisemitism in the Catholic Church. Carroll's next historical fiction novel, The Cloister (2018), follows the impact of twelfth-century theologian Peter Abelard's romance with his student Héloïse on a modern priest and a Holocaust survivor seeking refuge in Manhattan. In 2019, Carroll wrote a cover article for The Atlantic about the many Roman Catholic priests who have sexually abused children. He advocated for abolishing the priesthood in response to the charges. Carroll published his memoir, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul, in 2021.

Carroll has held several teaching positions and scholarly appointments at institutions of higher education, including Harvard University (Divinity School and the Kennedy School of Government), Brandeis University, Emory University, and Emerson College. From 2008 to 2015, he served as a distinguished scholar in residence at Suffolk University, in Boston, Massachusetts, and was also an associate at Harvard University's Mahindras Humanities Center. In 2015, Carroll was named a distinguished writer in residence at New York University.

Bibliography

Baumann, Paul. "Re: James Carroll." Commonweal 124.10 (1997): 6+. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.

Carroll, James. "Abolish the Priesthood." The Atlantic, June 2019, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/to-save-the-church-dismantle-the-priesthood/588073/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Carroll, James. "PW Talks to James Carroll." Interview by Dann McDorman. Publishers Weekly 27 Nov. 2000: 62. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.

Carroll, James. "The Sins of the High Court's Supreme Catholics." The New Yorker, 19 Aug. 2022, www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-sins-of-the-high-courts-supreme-catholics. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Cheuse, Alan. "'Warburg' Struggles for Love and Justice in Wartime Rome." Review of Warburg in Rome, by James Carroll. NPR Books. NPR, 27 June 2014. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.

O'Connell, Shaun. "That Much Credit: Irish-American Identity and Writing." Massachusetts Review 44.1/2 (2003): 251–268. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.

Schulson, Michael. "James Carroll on Disarming the Memory of Jesus: 'America Threatens the World with Violence in Ways That No Other Country Does.'" Salon. Salon Media Group, 20 Dec. 2014. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.

Sullivan, Brian. "Christ Actually." Rev. of Christ Actually, by James Carroll. Library Journal 139.18 (2014): 88. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.