Wilson Jr., Robley (1930 - )

Genre: General Fiction, Poetry, Short Stories

Robley Wilson, Jr., born in Brunswick, Maine, on 15 June 1930, is a short story writer, novelist, and poet, and was long-time editor (1968-2000) of The North American Review. He also taught in the English department at the University of Northern Iowa (Cedar Falls) from l963 until 2000.

He graduated from Bowdoin College with honors in English in 1957 (receiving an honorary degree from same in 1987) and earned an MFA with distinction from the University of Iowa in 1968.

His stories have appeared in anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize III, Best American Short Stories of l979, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Fiction of the Eighties: A decade of stories from TriQuarterly, and The Ploughshares Reader: New Fiction for the Eighties.

He contributed to Time and Chance: An Iowa Murder Mystery (1998), a serial novel by 17 Iowa writers.

He's married to fiction writer Susan Hubbard, English professor at the University of Central Florida (Orlando). Robley and Hubbard live in Orlando and Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Selected Bibliography

Short Stories

  • The Pleasures of Manhood: Stories (l977)
  • Living Alone: Fictions (l978)
  • Dancing for Men (l983), winner of the l982 Drue Heinz Literature Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press)
  • Terrible Kisses (l989)
  • The Book of Lost Fathers (2001)

Novels

  • The Victim's Daughter (1991)
  • Splendid Omens (2004)
  • The World Still Melting (2005)

Poetry Collections

  • Family Matters (l980)
  • Kingdoms of the Ordinary (l987) Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry winner
  • A Pleasure Tree (l990) winner of the 1990 Society of Midland Authors poetry award
  • Everything Paid For (1999)

Selected Links