Keith Fort
Keith Fort was an influential figure in the field of literature and education, born in 1934 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He earned his B.A. from the University of the South and went on to study in France on a Fulbright scholarship before serving in the Air Force. He completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Minnesota and joined the faculty at Georgetown University, where he dedicated his career to exploring the writing process and enhancing the writing curriculum. Fort was recognized for his contributions to education, particularly in developing programs aimed at recruiting minority students, and he received the Outstanding Teacher award in 1969.
In addition to his academic work, Fort engaged with the avant-garde literary movement of metafiction during the 1960s, producing experimental short stories that reflected on the act of writing itself. His most notable story, "The Coal Shoveller," delves into the struggles of a writer grappling with originality and artistic expression while observing a coal shoveler outside his window. Fort's work is characterized by a profound inquiry into the challenges of storytelling, ultimately revealing a triumph over creative despair. He retired in 1999 and was named professor emeritus, passing away in 2004, leaving behind a legacy of academic and literary innovation.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Keith Fort
Fiction Writer
- Born: 1934
- Birthplace: Chattanooga, Tennessee
- Died: August 19, 2004
Biography
Keith Fort was born in 1934 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He received his B.A. from the small, prestigious University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He studied at the Université Montpellier in France on a Fulbright scholarship and then served in the Air Force for a year and half before he was discharged as captain in the reserve in 1957. He earned his M.A. and his Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, completing his studies in 1964. He joined the faculty of Georgetown University, where he would remain throughout his teaching career, and there Fort developed a particular interest in the process of writing essays, which he explored in numerous academic publications. He helped develop Georgetown’s writing curriculum, which ranged from introductory composition courses to advanced studies in rhetoric theory. Recognized in 1969 as the university’s Outstanding Teacher, the award specifically cited Fort’s work in developing a university-wide program intended to assist recruiting minority students in the Washington D.C., area. He retired in 1999 and was named professor emeritus. He died August 19, 2004.
Apart from his pioneering academic publications, Fort extended his interest in the writing process itself into a series of experimental short stories published during the 1960’s. These were part of the avant-garde movement called metafiction, fictional texts that reflected on the process of their own creation. Metafiction was initially pioneered in the 1950’s by writers such as William Gass and John Barth, and its initial premise was that writers in the troubling world of post-Hiroshima realities could no longer simply tell stories because the tidy world of plot and character no longer applied to an absurd world that verged on imminent extinction. All that remained, said metafiction’s proponents, was the opportunity to the process of writing. In “The Coal Shoveller,” Fort’s most anthologized story, a writer, struggling to develop a story, watches from his study window as an African American man shovels coal into a basement across the street. The writer toys with different storylines, each time adapting a different classic prose style (including those of writers James Joyce and William Faulkner), hoping in such ventriloquism to find his way to a workable story. As each story gives way to frustration (he worries there is no originality left), he testily accuses himself of being a fraud and a narrow-minded, overeducated academic unable to muster the passion a writer needs. However, the writer cannot not write, as he acknowledges, because the alternative is insuperable silence, a metaphoric death. As the story ends, the writer remains at his study window as night darkens the room. Unable to write a story about the coal shoveller, he has instead written a story about writing the story, finding in that dilemma a way out by creating an interrogation of the process itself. Despair and frustration give way to modest victory.