Biography

William Gay was born on October 27, 1941 in Hohenwald, Tennessee, USA. William was a writer, known for The Long Home, Beyond the Pale and Bloodworth (2010). William was married to Dianne Bowen. William died on February 23, 2012 in Hohenwald, Tennessee, USA.

He spent four years in the Navy, serving in the Pacific. He lived for awhile in New York, where he mistakenly thought it was necessary to live in order to be a writer. In Chicago, he worked for a pinball machine manufacturer.

In the late '90s, he finally sold his first short stories to literary journals.

[on a collection of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, in a 2011 interview with the Tennessee Literary Project, an archive at Middle Tennessee State University] The Signet edition of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" was the best 35 cents I ever spent.

I've always felt sort of like in between things. Like I fit in when I was working construction. I more or less could do my job. I didn't get fired. I got paid. I could do it. But it was always sort of like working under cover. Now when I'm meeting academic people and going to these things they have [conferences], basically it's still the same thing. I'm still under cover. Then, I was sort of a closet intellectual passing as a construction worker. Now, I'm a construction worker passing as an academic.