Jack Cady

Jack Cady (March 20, 1932 - January 14, 2004) was an American author. He is most known as an award winning fantasist and horror writer. In his career he won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award.

Cady was a conscientious objector during the Korean War, but served in the U.S. Coast Guard in Maine. Later in life, he held several jobs, including truck driver, auctioneer, landscaper and finally university instructor. He first taught creative writing at the University of Washington from 1968 until 1973, and he then he had a number of short teaching stints at colleges in Illinois, Pennsylvania and Alaska from 1973 to 1978. In 1985 he began teaching writing at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, and he retired from that post in 1998. Cady married fellow writer Carol Orlock in 1977, and they remained together until his death. Cady's collected literary papers were donated to the Mortvedt Library at Pacific Lutheran in the spring of 2006.

A master of the short story, Cady is perhaps best known for the Nebula-winning tale "The Night We Buried Road Dog" (1993). His work at shorter lengths also won him a place in the Best American Short Stories anthologies of 1971 and 1972.

Cady also wrote science fiction. The dystopian novel McDowell's Ghost concerns a modern-day Southerner who keeps seeing the ghost of an ancestor killed during the Civil War; the spirit helps McDowell obtain justice for a female friend who was raped. Cady was born in Kentucky and McDowell's Ghost was his attempt to explain the Southern code of conduct with a reverence matched only by William Faulkner.

Cady was also a major believer in the value of history, not only towards understanding politics, but also writing itself. One of his books was The American Writer: Shaping a Nation's Mind, a survey of American literature.