James Wilcox

James Wilcox (b. April 4, 1949 in Hammond, Louisiana) is an American novelist and a professor at LSU in Baton Rouge. James Wilcox worked at Random House and Doubleday in New York after graduating from Yale. Wilcox was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986.

Wilcox is the author of nine comic novels most are set in, or featuring characters from, the fictional town of Tula Springs, Louisiana. Wilcox's first book Modern Baptists (1983) remains his best known work.

About his first novel, Modern Baptists, Robert Penn Warren commented, “...James Wilcox has made a tale that is realistic and fantastic, painfully comic, and, in a strange way, psychologically penetrating….There is no writer exactly like him. He is an original.” On the front page of The New York Times Book Review Anne Tyler wrote, “Every reviewer, no doubt, has methods for marking choice passages in a book. Mine is a system of colored paper clips; yellow means funny. Modern Baptists should be thick with yellow clips on every page, but it does even better than that. While I was reading it, I laughed so hard I kept forgetting my paper clips. Mr. Wilcox has real comic genius. He is a writer to make us all feel hopeful.” Walker Percy called this same novel, “a beauty.” Since its publication in 1983 Modern Baptists has been included in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon and listed in GQ’s 45th anniversary issue as one of the best works of fiction published in the past 45 years. In 1998 in U.S. News & World Report Toni Morrison counted Modern Baptists among her three “favorite works by unsung writers.” In 2005 Modern Baptists was reissued in Great Britain in a Penguin Modern Classics edition with an introduction by the novelist Jim Crace.

His other novels are :

• North Gladiola (1985)
• Miss Undine's Living Room (1987)
• Sort of Rich (1989)
• Polite Sex (1991)
• Guest of a Sinner (1993)
• Plain and Normal (1998)
• Heavenly Days (2003)
• Hunk City (2007)

Guest of a Sinner is set in NYC with characters from Tallahassee. Polite Sex and Plain and Normal are set mainly in NYC, but they do have a few characters who come from Tula Springs.

Wilcox is also the author of three short stories that were published in The New Yorker between 1981 and 1986. He was the subject of an article by James B. Stewart in The New Yorker's 1994 summer fiction issue; entitled "Moby Dick in Manhattan", it detailed his struggle to survive as a writer devoted purely to literary fiction.

Wilcox’s book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Elle. He has been a judge for the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for the best first-published book of fiction by an American writer published in 1991; for the 1994 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award; for the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society novella contest in 1999; and for the Eudora Welty Prize for Fiction given by The Southern Review in 2005. He was the recipient an ATLAS grant for 2007-08.

He was the Robert Penn Warren Professor at LSU from 2004–2007 and then Donald and Velvia Crumbley Professor from 2007-2010. LSU recognized him as the 2008 Distinguished Research Master of Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences. In 2009 he won an LSU Distinguished Faculty Award. Wilcox currently has held the MacCurdy Distinguished Professorship since 2010.He also serves as Director of Creative Writing at LSU.