Gordon Lish

Gordon Lish (born February 11, 1934) is an American writer.

As a literary editor, he championed many American authors, particularly Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Rick Bass, and Richard Ford.

He is the father of the novelist Atticus Lish.

Lish was raised in Hewlett, New York, on Long Island; his father was the founder and primary partner in Lish Brothers, a millinery firm.

During his formative years, he suffered from extreme psoriasis and was often ostracized by his peers.

He attended Phillips Academy but left without graduating following an altercation with an antisemitic classmate in 1952.

While briefly institutionalized in Westchester County, New York, following an adverse reaction to the hormone ACTH (used in psoriasis treatment), he developed a friendship with noted poet Hayden Carruth.

Following his release, he took a job as a radio broadcaster for WEIL in New Haven, Connecticut, under the pseudonym of Gordo Lockwood and continued to correspond with Carruth, who introduced Lish to the Partisan Review.

He relocated to Tucson, Arizona, due to the ameliorative effects of the region's climate on his psoriasis.

In November 1956, Lish married Loretta Frances Fokes; they would go on to have three children (Jennifer, Becca and Ethan).

After Frances advised him to attend college, Lish matriculated at the nearby University of Arizona.

He majored in English and German and clashed with creative writing instructor Edward Loomis, an adherent of the New Criticism who routinely disparaged Lish's more idiosyncratic influences, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac.

Nevertheless, Lish completed a cum laude degree in two years, graduating in 1959.

Following Lish's graduation, the family moved to San Francisco.

During this period, Lish experienced the last vestiges of the San Francisco Renaissance and completed a teaching credential at San Francisco State University in 1960.

Following another move to Burlingame, California, he took a position as an English teacher at Mills High School in Millbrae, California, where he joined a new Pacific Coast avant-garde literary journal, Chrysalis Review, edited by the San Francisco writer, John Herrmann.

When Herrmann left the magazine, Lish took it over, and eventually it evolved into Genesis West.

Genesis West was published in seven volumes by The Chrysalis West Foundation between 1961 and 1965.

While working on Genesis West, their house and magazine became a focus point, and celebrated such authors as Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Gilbert, and Herbert Gold.

Although Lish is not ranked among the Merry Pranksters, he often hosted Kesey and Cassady in his home.

Neal Cassady makes note of his time spent at the Lish home on page 151 of his only self-authored book, The First Third.

Carolyn Cassady makes note of the Lish home in Off the Road.

The outré nature of Genesis West incensed school board officials, and Lish was denied tenure in 1963; two fellow teachers left in protest, and the kerfuffle was covered by The Nation.

After refusing a fellowship at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a teaching position at Deep Springs College, Lish became editor-in-chief and director of linguistic studies at Behavioral Research Laboratories in Menlo Park, California.

There, in 1964, he produced English Grammar, a text for educators; Why Work, a book of interviews; New Sounds in American Fiction, a set of recorded dramatic readings of short stories; and A Man's Work, an information motivation sound system in vocational guidance.

It consisted of over 50 translucent albums.

While in Menlo Park, one of Lish's friends was Raymond Carver, who was then intermittently employed as an editor and public relations director at Science Research Associates, located across the street from Lish's office.

Lish edited a number of stories that wound up as Carver's first national magazine publications.

Despite his comparative obscurity, Lish relocated to New York City in late 1969 after being hired as fiction editor at Esquire on the basis of a provocative cover letter and the promise to publisher Arnold Gingrich that he would deliver "the new fiction"; he would hold this position until 1977.

Here he became known as "Captain Fiction" for the number of authors whose careers he assisted, including Carver, Richard Ford, Cynthia Ozick, Don DeLillo, Reynolds Price, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Raymond Kennedy, Alexander Theroux, and Barry Hannah.

With the exception of Ozick and DeLillo, all of these writers taught and/or studied in academic creative writing programs, reflecting a totemic shift in the institutionalization of American literature.

Throughout this period, Lish taught creative writing at Yale University as a lecturer and guest fellow.

It was at Esquire that Lish's aggressive editing of Carver's "Neighbors" in 1971 created the minimalist effect for which he was later known, as Carol Polsgrove pointed out in her 1995 book, ''It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, But Didn't We Have Fun?

Esquire in the Sixties''.

Polsgrove wrote, "On several pages of the twelve-page manuscript, fewer than half of Carver's words were left standing. Close to half were cut on several other pages."

While Carver accepted Lish's editorial changes, other writers (including close friends such as DeLillo, who pulled a planned excerpt from the forthcoming Great Jones Street in September 1972 because of Lish's expurgations) resisted.

Wrote Paul Bowles, "I fail completely to understand the meaning of the suggestions, or of the story as it incorporates them."

While at Esquire, Lish edited the collections The Secret Life of Our Times and All Our Secrets Are the Same, which contained pieces by a number of prominent authors, from Vladimir Nabokov to Milan Kundera.

In February 1977, Esquire published "For Rupert – with no promises" as an unsigned work of fiction: this was the first time it had published a work without identifying the author.

Readers speculated that it was the work of J. D. Salinger, but it was in fact a clever parody by Lish, who is quoted as saying, "I tried to borrow Salinger's voice and the psychological circumstances of his life, as I imagine them to be now. And I tried to use those things to elaborate on certain circumstances and events in his fiction to deepen them and add complexity."