Crowley is best known as the author of Little, Big (1981), a work which received
World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and has been called "a neglected masterpiece" by
Harold Bloom,[1] and his
Ægypt series of novels which revolve around the same themes of
Hermeticism, memory, families and religion. Some of his nonfiction writing has appeared bimonthly in Harper's Magazine in the form of his "Easy Chair" column, which ended in 2016.
Biography
John Crowley was born in
Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his twelfth (Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr) in 2017. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at
Yale University.[2] In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
He is also the recipient of an
Ingram Merrill Foundation grant.
James Merrill, the organization's founder, greatly loved Little, Big,[4] and was
blurbed praising Crowley on the first edition of Love & Sleep. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaiano (Italy); Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet; and the aforementioned Four Freedoms, about workers at an Oklahoma defense plant during World War II. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of
Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is now complete.[5]
Crowley's short fiction is collected in three volumes: Novelty (containing the World Fantasy Award-winning novella Great Work of Time), Antiquities, and Novelties & Souvenirs, an omnibus volume containing nearly all his short fiction through its publication in 2004. A collection of essays and reviews entitled In Other Words was published in early 2007.
Most of the ideas he has for books occur about ten years before he actually starts working on the books.[6]
In 1989 Crowley and his wife Laurie Block founded
Straight Ahead Pictures to produce media (film, video, radio and internet) on American history and culture. Crowley has written scripts for short films and documentaries, many historical documentaries for public television; his work has received numerous awards and has been shown at the New York Film Festival, the
Berlin Film Festival, and many others. His scripts include The World of Tomorrow (on the 1939
World's Fair), No Place to Hide (on the bomb shelter obsession), The Hindenburg (for HBO), and FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body (American
fitness practices and beliefs over the decades; with Laurie Block).[2]
Crowley's correspondence with literary critic Harold Bloom, and their mutual appreciation, led in 1993 to Crowley taking up a post at
Yale University, where he teaches courses in
Utopian fiction, fiction writing, and screenplay writing. Bloom claimed on Contentville.com that Little, Big ranks among the five best novels by a living writer, and included Little, Big, Ægypt (The Solitudes), and Love & Sleep in his canon of literature (in the appendix to The Western Canon, 1994). In his Preface to Snake's-Hands, Bloom identifies Crowley as his "favorite contemporary writer", and the Ægypt series as his "favorite romance...after Little, Big".
1997: Gone received the
Locus Award for Best Short Story[7]
1999: "La Grande oeuvre du temps", the
French language edition of "Great Work of Time" (translated by Monique LeBailly), won the
Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, Nouvelle étrangère (Grand Prize for translated story)[7][9]
2003: The Translator received the Italian Premio Flaiano[10]
2018: Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr received the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award [14]
2021: Kra, Dar Duchesne dans les ruines de l’Ymr, the French language edition of Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, received the
Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire for Foreign Novel[15]
Ægypt, Bantam (1987); revised and republished 2007 under intended original title, The Solitudes — 1988 World Fantasy Award and
Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee[7]
Crowley's short story "Flint and Mirror" (2018) was presented as "recently discovered among uncatalogued papers of the novelist Fellowes Kraft" (one of the Ægypt's protagonists).[16][17] He expanded the story into a 2022 novel of the same name,[18] though the link to Ægypt was omitted.
Short fiction
"Antiquities" (1977, in Whispers: An Anthology of Fantasy and Horror)
"Somewhere to Elsewhere" (1978 but printed as 1977, in The Little Magazine; an earlier draft of part of the first chapter and all of the second chapter of Little, Big)
"Where Spirits Gat Them Home" (1978, in Shadows anthology; later revised as "Her Bounty to the Dead")
"The Single Excursion of Caspar Last" (1979, in Gallery magazine; later incorporated into "Great Work of Time")
"The Reason for the Visit" (1980, in Interfaces anthology)
"Lost and Abandoned" (1997, in Black Swan, White Raven anthology)
"An Earthly Mother Sits and Sings" (2000, published as an original chapbook by
Dreamhaven Press, illustrated by
Charles Vess; included into Flint and Mirror)
"The War Between the Objects and the Subjects" (2002, in J. K. Potter's Embrace the Mutation anthology)
Novelty, Bantam (1989); collects "The Nightingale Sings At Night", "
Great Work of Time", "In Blue" and the previously published "Novelty".
Antiquities: Seven Stories,
Incunabula (1993); collects all of his stories to that point which were not included in Novelty.
Novelties and Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction, Perennial (2004); collects all of his short fiction up to that point, with the exception of "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines".
Totalitopia, PM Press (2017); collects four stories ("This Is Our Town", "Gone", "In the Tom Mix Museum", "And Go Like This"), three essays and the interview.[20]
And Go Like This: Stories, Small Beer Press (2019); collects all of his short fiction from 2002-2019.
Two Chapters in a Family Chronicle, Ninepin Press (2024).
Omnibuses
Beasts/Engine Summer/Little Big, QPBC (1991)
Three Novels (1994; later published as Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley. It includes The Deep, Beasts, Engine Summer).
Documentary scripts
America Lost and Found (1979)
Hindenberg: Ship of Doom (1980)
No Place to Hide (1983; 30 min)
America and Lewis Hine (1984, with Laurie Block and Daniel Allentuck; 60 min)
The World of Tomorrow (1984; 76 min)
Are We Winning Mommy? America and the Cold War (1986, with Laurie Block; 87 min)
A $10 Horse and a $40 Saddle (1987)
Fit: Episodes in the History of the Body (1991, with Laurie Block; 74 min)