Jayne Anne Phillips

• Born: July 19, 1952
• Place of Birth: Buckhannon, West Virginia

Biography

Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia, a pleasant middle-class town, on July 19, 1952, the middle child, between brothers, of Russell R. Phillips, a contractor, and Martha Jane Thornhill, a teacher. Phillips attended West Virginia University, where she earned a B.A. degree, and graduated in 1974 magna cum laude. Four years later, she earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa’s renowned writer’s program. Phillips taught briefly at Humboldt State University and then held the Fanny Howe Chair of Letters at Brandeis University and the post of adjunct associate professor of English at Boston University. In 1985, she married Mark Brian Stockman, a physician. Phillips has also taught at Harvard University and Williams College, among others.

Phillips began writing poetry in high school. Her childhood ended abruptly in the early 1970s, when her parents were divorced and she moved away from her hometown to begin college nearby. Her poetry was published while she still attended the University of West Virginia as an undergraduate. Only after graduation did she begin writing fiction, creating highly compressed stories in which her poetic discipline shone through. Phillips has continued in this vein, using carefully chosen words and images to their potential. She has tended to write not from an outline, as novelists often do, but line by line, as do poets.

In 1978, Phillips made the most of an opportunity when she gave Delacorte editor Seymour Lawrence a copy of Sweethearts (1976), one of her early chapbooks. Lawrence, within weeks, wrote Phillips a postcard with the career-launching message, “Bring your stories to Boston.” This contact led to Phillips’s first publication, Black Tickets (1979), which met with widespread praise and critical acclaim. In this collection of twenty-seven works, ranging in length from single-paragraph vignettes to well-developed short stories, Phillips displayed her talent at giving characters from all walks of life, including the unsavory, an empathetic voice, while managing to avoid any traces of sentimentality.

Phillips gathered much of her sharp insight into the underworld in 1972, when she and a girlfriend hitchhiked from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to California and back again. The writer once remarked in an interview how during that odyssey she “learned what it meant to be afraid,” as the twenty-year-old girls narrowly escaped physical violence several times.

In the novel Machine Dreams (1984), her second major publication, Phillips continued to create empathetic characters and again received largely favorable criticism. The film rights to her novel were purchased by actress Jessica Lange.

Phillips has won numerous awards for both her trade publications and chapbook stories. In 1977, 1979, and 1983, she was awarded the Pushcart Prize for four short stories. The Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines gave Phillips the Fels Award in fiction in 1978; she received National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in 1978 and 1985, and in 1979, she was awarded the St. Lawrence Award for fiction. A milestone was reached in her career in 1980 when she received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, followed in that same year by the O. Henry Award. In 1981, Phillips won a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College. Upon publication of her first novel, Machine Dreams, in 1984, Phillips won a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, an American Library Association Notable Book citation, and The New York Times Best Books of 1984 citation. Shelter, her 1994 novel, won an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and was chosen one of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly.

In her later career, Phillips focused on publishing novels. In 1994, she released the Southern fiction book Shelter, while the 2000s brought the semi-autobiographical MotherKind (2000), which won the Massachusetts Book Award, and the realistic fiction Lark and Termite (2008), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2013, Phillips published the novel Quiet Dell, which is a true crime novel that concerns a 1931 multiple murder in West Virginia. For her 2023 historical fiction novel, Night Watch, Phillips was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel centers on a family in the aftermath of the United States Civil War and engages themes of identity, community, trauma, and memory. Phillips was honored with an honorary doctorate of humane letters by West Virginia University.

Analysis

The long list of awards with which Phillips has been honored indicates how favorable the critics have been from the onset of her career. Black Tickets was released with advance praise from nine writers emblazoned on the back cover, a prophecy of what was to come, even from well-known critics, such as popular contemporary novelist John Irving. Irving noted that Phillips is “especially effective with sex and drugs.”

Black Tickets contains three distinct subgenres: brief (as short as a single paragraph) literary exercises, more developed interior monologues of desperate or deranged individuals, and fully developed short stories about ordinary people struggling with family relationships. Irving, along with the majority of Phillips’s critics, believed that, although her shocking, shorter pieces and interior monologues were evidence of Phillips’s extraordinary talent, her best work was done in the longer stories that explored the nature of the modern American family.

Phillips’s preoccupation with generations of families and changing gender roles emerged as major themes in her first novel, Machine Dreams. This work displayed her talent at giving a range of characters unique and believable voices, which matured appropriately as the characters lost their youthful innocence and their world changed around them, inexplicably, yet permanently. During another interview, Phillips explained that her source for such honest, first-person prose “has to do with ear, with listening in a particular way to how people talk and being able to expand on fragments of heard talk, staying with the sound and then enlarging it.”

Because her main subject matter has been either social outcasts or the decay of American societal values, Phillips could not have avoided planting political messages within her fiction. Her concern with the differences between the 1960s and the successive decades remains evident in her work. She has contrasted the community-oriented 1960s with the 1970s, when young people no longer rallied around unifying causes such as civil rights and lacked national heroes such as Martin Luther King, Jr. During an interview, she capsulized her perspective on changes between two decades in this example: “Kids dropping acid [in the 1970s] did it to obliterate themselves, not to have a religious experience.” In a technologically advanced, mechanized world, Phillips has witnessed a decline in the richness of life. With more mechanization having pervaded Americans’ lives during the 1980s, Phillips does not predict improvement over time. In the same interview, she continued: “In the ’70s there was still enough security so that people felt they could be floaters. Now things are too shaky for that.”

Phillips’s ominous perspective on modern times accounts for the shocking images of sexual deviation and drug abuse that she portrays in much of her short fiction. “Gemcrack,” for example, is about a mass murderer, and even the title of “Lechery” indicates its unsavoriness. This focus on the most negative aspects of contemporary society contrasts sharply with Phillips’s loving portrayal of a nostalgic past in Machine Dreams, complete with drive-in hamburger joints and the post–World War II American love affair with luxurious automobiles.

Phillips has been classed as a regional writer after the fashion of distinguished southern storytellers Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, whom she has claimed as two of her influences. While Phillips has objected to the term “regional,” claiming that she, as well as her role models, have far more universal appeal than the classification “regional writer” would indicate, she has accepted the high praise of being grouped with these masters of fiction.

A poet become short-story writer become novelist, Phillips has combined the disciplines of all three fields to create compact prose filled with imagery and with sometimes familiar, sometimes strange, yet always distinctive voices. Her stories of family life revisit Americana, while her tales of the deprived and depraved speak of the America that is ignored.

Phillips offers the reader an honest look at how contemporary issues have negatively affected the core of American society, the family. Her stories, while not cheerful, explore sensitive issues in an age of mechanization.

Bibliography

Carter, Susanne. “Variations on Vietnam: Women’s Innovative Interpretations of the Vietnam War Experience.” Extrapolation 32, Summer, 1991, pp. 170-183.

Corcoran, Jonathan. “In Praise of Pulitzer Prize-Winner Jayne Anne Phillips.” Literary Hub, 8 May 2024, lithub.com/in-praise-of-pulitzer-prize-winner-jayne-anne-phillips/. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Edelstein, David. “The Short Story of Jayne Anne Phillips: She Transforms Isolation and Dark Obsession into Exquisite Prose.” Esquire, vol. 104, Dec. 1985, pp. 108-112.

Garner, Dwight. "Jayne Anne Phillips Finds Anguish and Asylum in Civil War America." Review of Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips. The New York Times, 25 Sept. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/09/25/books/review/jayne-anne-phillips-finds-anguish-and-asylum-in-civil-war-america.html. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Godden, Richard. “No End to the Work? Jayne Anne Phillips and the Exquisite Corpse of Southern Labor.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 36, Aug. 2002, pp. 249-279.

Goldberg, G. D. “The Intimacy of Mass Culture.” New Perspectives Quarterly, vol. 7, Winter 1990, pp. 58-62.

Kakutani, Michiko. "In War and Floods, a Family's Leimotif of Love, Memories and Secrets." Review of Lark and Termite, by Jayne Anne Phillips. The New York Times, 5 Jan. 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/books/06kaku.html. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Neary, Lynn. "Quiet Dell Revives Depression-era Murder Story." Review of Quiet Dell, by Jayne Anne Phillips, NPR, 15 Oct. 2013, www.npr.org/2013/10/15/234681427/quiet-dell-revives-a-depression-era-murder-story. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

"Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)." The Pulitzer Prizes, 2024, www.pulitzer.org/winners/jayne-anne-phillips. Accessed 24 June 2024.

“Jayne Anne Phillips.” Harper’s Bazaar, Oct. 1984, p. 213.

Lassner, Phyllis. “Jayne Anne Phillips: Women’s Narrative and the Re-creation of History.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman. UP of Kentucky, 1989.

Phillips, Jayne Anne. “Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips.” Interview by Celia Gilbert. Publishers Weekly, 8 June 1984, pp. 65-67.