R. A. Lafferty | |
|---|---|
 Lafferty in 1984 | |
| Born | Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (1914-11-07)November 7, 1914 Neola, Iowa, U.S. |
| Died | March 18, 2002(2002-03-18) (aged 87) Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story author |
| Genre | Science fiction,Fantasy |
| Notable works | Past Master,Space Chantey,Fourth Mansions,Nine Hundred Grandmothers,Okla Hannali |
Raphael AloysiusLafferty (November 7, 1914 – March 18, 2002) was an Americanscience fiction,fantasy andhistorical fiction writer best known for his imaginative and eccentric short stories and novels from the 1960s and 1970s.[1][2][3]
Lafferty was born on November 7, 1914, inNeola, Iowa[3] to devoutlyCatholic parents, Hugh David Lafferty, a broker dealing in oil leases and royalties, and Julia Mary (née Burke), a teacher. Both were first-generationIrish Americans.[4] He was born the youngest of five siblings. One of the origins Lafferty has offered for his first name, Raphael, is that it was derived from the day on which he was expected to be born (October 24, the Feast ofSt. Raphael); he also speculates that he might have been named after the artist, or that he was named after St Raphael's Cathedral.[5] When he was four, his family moved toPerry, Oklahoma.[3]
He graduated fromCascia Hall,[6] and came of age in the early years of theGreat Depression. He studied in the night school division at theUniversity of Tulsa in 1932–33, mostly studying math and German, but left before graduating.[7] In 1935, he began to work for Clark Electrical Supply Company inTulsa and, from 1939 to 1942, attended theInternational Correspondence School, becoming what he described as a "correspondence school engineer".[8] One of his hobbies was studying languages.[7] PerThe New York Times, "He taught himselfGreek in order to read theNew Testament in the original."[3]
He enlisted in theU.S. Army in 1942. After training inTexas,North Carolina,Florida, andCalifornia, he was sent to theSouth Pacific Area, serving inAustralia,New Guinea,Morotai and thePhilippines. When he left the Army in 1946, he had become a 1st Sergeant serving as astaff sergeant and had received anAsiatic–Pacific Campaign Medal.[9] He returned to his sales position at Clark and turned to writing in the late 1950s.[2] He never married and lived most of his life in Tulsa with his sister, Anna Lafferty.[3]
Although Lafferty did not begin writing until his mid-40s, he wrote dozens of novels and more than two hundred short stories, most of them at least nominally science fiction.[2] As he explained in a 1968 publication, "I was a heavy drinker... I cut down on it, beginning my writing attempts at about the same time to fill a certain void."[8] His first published story was "The Wagons" in theNew Mexico Quarterly Review in 1959. His first published science fiction story was "Day of the Glacier", inThe Original Science Fiction Stories in 1960, and hisdebut novel wasPast Master in 1968.[3] In the same year, he also publishedThe Reefs of Earth andSpace Chantey, a science fiction retelling ofHomer'sOdyssey, which was then followed byFourth Mansions (1969), a work inspired byTeresa of Ávila.[10]
Around 1980, his output declined due to a stroke. He stopped writing regularly in 1984.[11] In 1994, he suffered another, more severe, stroke.[citation needed]
Lafferty's work was represented byVirginia Kidd Literary Agency,[12] which held a cache of his unpublished manuscripts.[11] This included over a dozen novels, such asIron Tongue of Midnight, as well as about eighty short stories and a handful of essays.[13]
He died on March 18, 2002, aged 87 in a nursing home inBroken Arrow, Oklahoma. Lafferty's funeral took place at Christ the King Catholic Church in Tulsa, where he regularly attended daily Mass. He is buried at St. Rose Catholic Cemetery in Perry.[6]
His collected papers, drafts of novels and short stories, artifacts, and ephemera were donated to the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives.[14] A smaller collection, donated by Lafferty in 1979, is also housed in theUniversity of Iowa Libraries' Special Collections department.[15]
In March 2011, it was announced inLocus that the copyrights to 29 Lafferty novels and 225 short stories were up for sale.[16][17][18] The literary estate was soon thereafter purchased by the magazine's nonprofit foundation, under the auspices of board memberNeil Gaiman.[19]
In his 2006 short story collectionFragile Things,Neil Gaiman includes a short story called "Sunbird" written in the style of Lafferty. In the introduction, he says this about Lafferty:
There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma (he died in 2002), who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable -- you knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young I wrote to him, and he wrote back.
"Sunbird" was my attempt to write a Lafferty story, and it taught me a number of things, mostly how much harder they are than they look....[20]
Gaiman and Lafferty had corresponded for several years during Gaiman's adolescence; he remembered Lafferty's letters as "filled with typical cock-eyed Lafferty humour and observations, wise and funny and sober all at once."[21]
PerThe Encyclopedia of Science Fiction:
He has fairly been described as a writer of tall tales, as a cartoonist, as an author whose tone was fundamentally oral; his conservative Catholicism has been seen as permeating every word he wrote (or has been ignored); he has been seen as a ransacker of old Mythologies, and as a flippant generator of new ones; he clearly delighted in a vision of the world as being irradiated by conspiracies both godly and devilish, but at times paid scant attention to the niceties of plotting; he has been understood by some as essentially light-hearted and by others as a solitary, stringent moralist; he was technically inventive, but lunged constantly into a slapdash sublime only skittishly evocative, and only occasionally, of anything like the traditional Sense of Wonder; his skill in the deploying of various rhetorical narrative voices was manifest, but these voices were sometimes choked in baroque flamboyance. ... He andGene Wolfe have more than a shared faith in common.[10]
He has also been compared to the English writerG. K. Chesterton: "[Once a] French publisher nervously asked whether Lafferty minded being compared toG. K. Chesterton (another Catholic author), and there was a terrifying silence that went on and on. Was the great man hideously offended? Eventually, very slowly, he said: 'You're on the right track, kid,' and wandered away."[22]
Lafferty's quirky prose[3] drew from traditional storytelling styles, largely from theIrish andNative American, and hisshaggy-dog characters and tall tales are unique in science fiction. Little of Lafferty's writing is considered typical of the genre. His stories are closer totall tales than traditional science fiction and are deeply influenced by hisCatholic beliefs;Fourth Mansions, for example, draws onThe Interior Mansions ofTeresa of Ávila.
His writings, both topically and stylistically, are not easy to categorize. Plot is frequently secondary to other elements of Lafferty's writing. While this style has resulted in a loyal cult following, it causes some readers to give up reading his work. Not all of Lafferty's work was science fiction or fantasy. His novelOkla Hannali (1972), published by University of Oklahoma Press, tells the story of theChoctaw inMississippi, and after theTrail of Tears, inOklahoma, through an account of the larger-than-life character Hannali and his large family. This novel was thought of highly by the novelistDee Brown, author ofBury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), who on the back cover of the edition published by theUniversity of Oklahoma Press, writes "The history of the Choctaw Indians has been told before and is still being told, but it has never been told in the way Lafferty tells it ... Hannali is a buffalo bull of a man who should become one of the enduring characters in the literature of the American Indian." He also wrote, "It is art applied to history so that the legend of the Choctaws, their great and small men, their splendid humor, and their tragedies are filled with life and breath."
Lafferty receivedHugo Award nominations forPast Master, "Continued on Next Rock", "Sky", and "Eurema's Dam", the last of which won the Best Short Story Hugo in 1973 (shared withFrederik Pohl andCyril M. Kornbluth's "The Meeting").[23]
He receivedNebula Award nominations for "In Our Block", "Slow Tuesday Night",Past Master,Fourth Mansions, "Continued on Next Rock", "Entire And Perfect Chrysolite", andThe Devil is Dead. He never received a Nebula award.[11]
His collectionLafferty in Orbit was nominated for aWorld Fantasy Award, and in 1990, Lafferty received a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.[24] His 1992 collectionIron Tears was also a finalist for thePhilip K. Dick Award.[11] In 2002, he received theCordwainer Smith Foundation'sRediscovery award.[25]
TheOklahoma Department of Libraries granted him theArrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995.[26]
Fourth Mansions was also named byDavid Pringle as one of his selections forModern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels.[citation needed]
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