Author Profile: David Gates is an American journalist, writer and novelist.
Name: David Gates
Timeline:
1991 – Jernigan
1997 – The Napoleonic Wars, 1803 – 1815
1998 – Preston Falls
1999 – The Wonder of the Invisible World
2015 – A Hand Reached Down to Guide
Background: David Gates was born on 8th January 1947 in Middletown, Connecticut, United States. He is 73 years old. He completed his B.A. in 1972 at the University of Connecticut.
Presently David teaches in the graduate writing program at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the University of Montana. He is the Dog House Band member here performing on the pedal steel, guitar and vocals.
David Gates has been an editor and senior writer for the Newsweek magazine Arts Section until the year 2008, where he specialized in articles related to music and books.
Pauline Kael, W.H. Auden and Samuel Johnson are his old mentors from the University of Connecticut besides Ezra Pound and J.D. O’Hara have been his mentors for his writing work.
Genre: David Gate’s genre is fiction. Being a culture writer for Newsweek, David Gates has made an entry into millions of homes each week. However not many readers are aware that he is a ferociously gifted fiction writer.
David Gates states that his tastes are pretty fully formed much before he starts writing his stories. He started writing fiction around the age of thirty three before which he had become a graduate in English. According to David Gates an accurate account or description of the work in question and an accurate report of reaction of the critics to it, helps make a good piece of critical writing.
Literary Contributions: Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada, in 1998 is David Gate’s most notable award. In 1992, Jernigan was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The novel was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Unique Stylistic Features: Jernigan, his first novel is about a dysfunctional one-parent family. It is a riveting black comedy about a man on the edge.
Preston Falls (1998) is David Gates second novel after which he wrote two short story collections, The Wonders of the Invisible World (1999) and A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me (2015).
His short stories have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bookforum, Tin House, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The Oxford American, H.O.W., The Journal of Country Music, TriQuarterly, Grand Street, GQ, The Paris Review, Ploughshares and Esquire magazine. Preston Falls his second novel is a darkly comic novel about a marriage that did not turn out well.
