Andre Dubus
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Andre Dubus (August 11, 1936 - February 24, 1999) was an American short story writer, essayist, and autobiographer.
[edit] Biography
Andre Dubus was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the youngest child of a Cajun-Irish Catholic family, whose name is pronounced "Duh--byoose" with the accent on the second syllable, which rhymes with the word "muse." He grew up in the Bayou country in Lafayette, Louisiana. As a young boy, he was educated by the Christian Brothers in a Catholic parochial school that emphasized literature and writing--including creative writing. Dubus graduated from nearby McNeese State College in 1958 as a journalism and English major. He then spent six years in the Marine Corps rising to the rank of captain and also marrying for the first time and beginning his family. After he left the Marine Corps, he moved with his wife and four children to Iowa City and graduated from the University of Iowa's Iowa Writers' Workshop with an MFA in creative writing. After receiving his MFA, Dubus taught for a short while in the South but he soon grew tired of and distressed with the social conditions of the South, especially the racism. So he moved to the northeast and from 1966 to 1984, he taught at Bradford College in Massachusetts. The teaching loads were high and the salary was low at Bradford, but Dubus needed the money to support his family and to attempt to promote his career as a writer, so he worked under those difficult conditions for 18 years. However, in 1984, he experienced chest pains and shortness of breath that were originally diagnosed as a mild heart attack but were later determined to be a reaction to stress and exhaustion, so Dubus resigned from Bradford. During his career, he also taught at the University of Alabama and Boston University.
Andre Dubus's life was marked by tragedies. His sister was raped as a young woman, leading Dubus to many years of fear for his loved ones' safety. He carried personal firearms to protect himself and those around him until the night in the late 1980s that he almost shot a man in a drunken argument outside a bar in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In his essay "Giving up the Gun", published in The New Yorker, he describes that night as the point at which he decided to stop arming himself and to take a less defensive, perhaps hostile and paranoid, view of life.
Dubus experienced a far deeper personal tragedy late on the night of July 23, 1986 when he was seriously injured in a car accident. He was driving from Boston to his home in Haverhill, Massachusetts and he stopped to assist two disabled motorists--brother and sister Luis and Luz Santiago, who had run over a motorcycle abandoned on the highway. As Dubus was assisting the injured Luz to the side of the highway, an oncoming car swerved toward the group and hit them. Luis was killed instantly; Luz survived because Dubus pushed her out of the way; and Dubus himself was critically injured. The impact of the collision sent him over the car's hood and roof and he landed on the trunk. As a result of the accident, both of his legs were crushed, and his left leg had to be amputated above the knee, and he lost the use of his right leg. He spent three painful years undergoing several surgeries and extensive physical therapy. Despite his efforts to walk with a prosthesis, chronic infections confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He continued to battle a great deal of physical pain from the ongoing problems and infections, and he also struggled with clinical depression. In the course of his struggles, his third wife left him and left with their two young daughters. To help Dubus with his mounting medical bills, his friends and fellow writers, Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike held a special literary benefit to help pay for Dubus' medical bills. Dubus was extremely grateful, and his appreciation extended to holding workshops and reading sessions to help other aspiring writers with their careers.
Even under these difficult physical, psychological, and emotional difficulties, Dubus continued to write and produced two books of autobiographical essays and a collection of short stories. He also conducted a weekly writer's workshop in his home, meeting with a group of young writers, many of whom were teenage girls in a residential program for abused adolescents. He also found a deeper religious faith. A practicing Catholic all of his life, Dubus found that the loss of his mobility eventually drew him closer to God and also renewed his Catholic faith at deeper personal levels. His spirituality and his personal relationship with God became an important element of his final years, and those who knew him admired the peace and acceptance he had achieved as well as his ability to live his life without bitterness or self-pity. He spent his later years in Haverhill, until his death from a heart attack in 1999. He was found by a friend slumped in his special shower chair with the water running cold. He is buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Bradford, Massachusetts, which is part of Haverhill.
Dubus was married three times and had six children. His son Andre Dubus III is also an author, whose most noteworthy book is the novel House of Sand and Fog (1999), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and which also was made into a movie (also called House of Sand and Fog) in 2003 starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly.
[edit] Writing career
Although he did write a novel, The Lieutenant, in 1967, Dubus considered himself to be and is mainly known as a writer of short fiction and novellas. He was aware that shorter fiction did not offer the level of fame and money that novels did, but he was dedicated to writing well in the genres that he most preferred and enjoyed. And so throughout his career, he published most of his work in small but distinguished literary journals such as Ploughshares and Sewanee Review. He was also loyal to a small publishing firm run by David R. Godine that published his first works. Even when larger book publishers with more financially rewarding deals pursued him, Dubus stayed with Godine for nearly all of his career. It was only in the last few years of his life when his medical bills became so large that Dubus switched publishers to Alfred A. Knopf to publish his last two volumes.
Dubus had a rather extensive literary career. His collections include: Separate Flights (1975), Adultery and Other Choices (1977), Finding a Girl in America (1980), The Times are Never So Bad (1983), Voices from the Moon (1984), The Last Worthless Evening (1986), Selected Stories (1988), Broken Vessels (1991), Dancing After Hours (1996), and Meditations from a Movable Chair (1998). His writing awards include the PEN/Malamud, the Rea Award for excellence in short fiction, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and also fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. There are several writing awards named after him. His literary papers are archived at McNeese State University and Xavier University in Louisiana.
[edit] Cinematic adaptations
After Andre Dubus' death, his story "Killings" was adapted into the movie In the Bedroom starring Sissy Spacek; it was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Screenplay Based on Material Previously Published. The 2004 movie, We Don't Live Here Anymore, starring Mark Ruffalo, Peter Krause, Naomi Watts, and Laura Dern is based upon two of Dubus' short stories: "We Don't Live Here Anymore" and "Adultery."
