Brian Doyle (American writer)

Brian James Patrick Doyle was an American writer.

He was a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and three Pushcart Prizes.

He lived with his wife and three children in Portland, Oregon.

He was born in 1956 in New York City to an Irish Catholic family.

His mother, Ethel Clancey Doyle, was a teacher, and his father, James Doyle, was a journalist.

Doyle credits becoming a writer to his father: But in almost every class I am asked how I became a writer, and after I make my usual joke about it being a benign neurosis, as my late friend George Higgins once told me, I usually talk about my dad.

My dad was a newspaperman, and still is, at age 92, a man of great grace and patience and dignity, and he taught me immensely valuable lessons.

If you wish to be a writer, write, he would say.

There are people who talk about writing and then there are people who sit down and type.

Writing is fast typing.

Also you must read like you are starving for ink.

Read widely.

Read everything.

Read the Bible once a year or so, ideally the King James, to be reminded that rhythm and cadence are your friends as a writer.

Most religious writing is terrible whereas some spiritual writing is stunning.

The New Testament in the King James version, for example.

He studied at the University of Notre Dame, where he graduated with a major in English in 1978.

Before moving to Oregon, Doyle worked at the U.S. Catholic and Boston College magazines.

He later married artist Mary Miller.

They would go on to have three children, a daughter and twin sons, who often inspired Doyle's work.

Doyle was also an editor of Portland Magazine.

Doyle's essays and poems have appeared in magazines and journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The American Scholar, Orion, Commonweal, and The Georgia Review and in newspapers such as The Times of London, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Kansas City Star, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Ottawa Citizen, and Newsday.

He was a book reviewer for The Oregonian and a contributing essayist to both Eureka Street magazine and The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia.

—Brian Doyle, writing in The American Scholar (August 23, 2013)

In May 2017, he died at the age of 60 due to a brain tumor.