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 Actress Meg Ryan optioned an unpublished novel of Williams's for her Prufrock Films Production Company as well.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:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The novels are as useful as Bibles, if they teach you the secret, that the best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)