2009 Thomas Wolfe Prize & Lecture: ROY BLOUNT Jr.
Describing the word foot in his recent book Alphabet Juice, Roy Blount Jr. praises its “f for the sensitive cushioned padfall of ball and heel, oo for the aloofness of the arch, and t for the tip of the toe pushing off.” If these are the words of a humorist – and Blount has a commanding claim on the title of America’s foremost humorist – then they are the words of a humorist with poetry in him, one who understands the deepest registers of language.
Blount has twenty-one books to his credit – including the essays Crackers (1982), the light verse Soupsongs & Webster's Ark (1988), the novel First Hubby (1991), the anthology Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor (1994), the memoir Be Sweet (1998), and the biography Robert E. Lee (2003) – and is working on a sequel to Alphabet Juice to be entitled Alphabetter Juice. His work has appeared in 166 different periodicals, ranging from The New Yorker to Organic Gardening, with Playboy somewhere in the middle. His list of accomplishments extends beyond the printed page. As a panelist on NPR’s popular Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, he is known and loved country-wide. He is a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, and he wrote the screenplay of Larger Than Life featuring Bill Murray and the elephant Tai. As president of the Authors Guild, he has been much engaged in the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit, recently publishing an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times regarding Amazon’s Kindle 2 and the rights of authors in audio productions of their work.
As his website summarizes, Roy Blount Jr. was “born l94l to Southern parents in Indianapolis. Grew up in Decatur, Georgia. Vanderbilt B.A. '63, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude; Harvard M.A. '64. U.S. Army l964-66. Reporter and columnist for Atlanta Journal and part-time English instructor at Georgia State College, l966-68. Free-lance since leaving SI in l975.” Blount ended his tenure as senior writer at Sports Illustrated shortly after the publication of his first book, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, which Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, called "the best of all books about pro football.” Twenty books and twenty-five years later, what has become manifestly evident is that the ol’ Roy so many people know and embrace fondly – garrulous, loose on his feet, forever funny and ready with wit and whimsy – is a seriously dedicated literary artist, working unceasingly at what Dylan Thomas, in reference to his own work, called his “craft or sullen art,” though Blount and his art are far from sullen.
Finally, Roy Blount Jr. has been fishing in Florida for thirty years straight as a charter member of the Alligator Point Boys, one of the world’s premier fishing clubs.