Throughout history, writers in different eras have been a dime a dozen. Everywhere you turn someone is writing something new and interesting, but how often does one actually make it? Well, back in year nineteen fifty-two, a man came to be that would someday make it in the tangled skeins of the writing world. In Gainesville, Florida, a man named Padgett Powell was born into a world that he would soon bombard with his interesting yet, obscure stories. Throughout his childhood he moved from place to place in various parts of Florida. From Tampa to Jacksonville he was a man of the world, or Florida at the very least. Toward the end of his childhood he and his parents moved to North Carolina where he then decided to attend the University of North Carolina in Charleston. He began as an English major, but his frequent disputes with his professors convinced him to change to Chemistry major.
Official seal of Gainesville
Gainesville, c. 1900.
English: Lemuel P. Padgett, US Representative from...Quickly realizing that he was not cut out to be a member of the Chemistry Society, he dropped out of the university and became a roofer in the region known as Texas. In 1983, when he needed a change of course in his life, he enrolled in the University of Houston's Master of fine arts in fiction writing program, hoping to meet the woman of his dreams. Instead he met Donald Barthelme, a post modernist writer who had just recently joined the Houston faculty. Powell then began his prominent writing career by creating the first three chapters of his
Kleiner 2
award winning novel, Edisto. In 1984, after marrying poet Sidney Wade, Powell applied and was granted a position at the University of Florida as a professor of their creative writing department. His book Edisto flourished and produced more than 30,000 copies and was...