Novels
Williams is best known for his work as a novelist. Of his 17 published books, 12 are novels.
His first novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest (W.W. Norton, 1984) is the story of a retired junior college history professor who has returned to his home place on a pond in north central Georgia to spend the last year of his life. The book won the Townsend Prize for fiction in 1986 and has subsequently come out in editions from Ballantine Books, Peachtree Publishers, and the University of Georgia Press. It was also translated into Swedish and published in a large-print format.
Williams’s second novel, All the Western Stars (Peachtree Publisher, 1988) is the story of two old men who run away from a rest home to become cowboys on a ranch in Texas. This book also came out in an edition from Ballantine and was translated into German. Richard Zanuck and David Brown optioned the book for MGM as a film project, though it was never put into production there. (MGM hired Williams to write one version of the screenplay.) Instead, the project was picked up by Rysher Entertainment, where it was greenlighted, with Jack Lemmon and James Garner to star. When Lemmon withdrew from the project, the film was shelved and has yet to be made.
Subsequent novels include:
- Slow Dance in Autumn (Peachtree Publishers, 1988)
- The Song of Daniel (Peachtree Publishers, 1989)
- Perfect Timing (Peachtree Publishers, 1991)
- Final Heat (Turtle Bay Books/Random House, 1992)
- Blue Crystal (Grove Press, 1993)
- The True and Authentic History of Jenny Dorset (Longstreet Press, 1997)
- A Distant Flame (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s, 2004)
- The Campfire Boys (Mercer University Press, 2009)
- The Divine Comics: A Vaudeville Show in Three Acts (Mercer University Press, 2011)
- Emerson's Brother (Mercer University Press, 2012)
Slow Dance in Autumn was translated into Japanese, and Final Heat into German and French. Perfect Timing was optioned for film by director Ron Howard and was a Literary Guild selection. Actress Meg Ryan optioned an unpublished novel of Williams's for her Prufrock Films Production Company as well.
A Distant Flame is perhaps Williams’s most notable book to date and won the 2004 Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction award.
Read more about this topic: Philip Lee Williams
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programmes, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)