Tennessee Literary Luminaries by Sue Freeman Culverhouse

Author:Sue Freeman Culverhouse [Culverhouse, Sue Freeman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Travel, South, East South Central (AL; KY; MS; TN)
ISBN: 9781625840226
Google: 96p2CQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2013-09-10T03:36:51+00:00

Painting by William Gay. Photo by J.M. White.

William’s sons (left to right) William and Chris. Bill Larson.

DEATH AND REFLECTIONS OF FRIENDS

On the night of February 23, 2012, William made a fire in his wood-burning stove, according to his son Chris. Then he went into his bedroom, closed the door and died, apparently of a heart attack. He wanted no funeral and was cremated. Chris placed a headstone in the family cemetery but the ashes were scattered near the place where he was born.

It took many of the larger newspapers in the country a few days to learn that William had died, but eventually, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other newspapers ran extensive obituaries of the man whose name never became a household word. Yet the stories and novels he wrote will live forever in the annals of literature.

Tom Franklin and Marshall Chapman, both close friends of William, wrote moving tributes in the Oxford American.

Sonny Brewer marvels at the command of the English language William had. The phrase “A hot August sun was smoking up over a wavering tree line. Such drunks as were still about struggled beneath the malign heat slowly and painfully as if they moved in altered time or through an atmosphere thickening to amber” from The Long Home is but a small sample of William’s art of description.

The name William Gay never hit the bestseller list, nor were his the books most people had on their bedside tables at night. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have been.

“I bet God has William Gay’s books on his bedside table,” said Karen Spears Zacharias in “The Brilliant Gay.” Many writers and all his friends agree.

After William Gay died, I was able to buy an old notebook from his younger son; it had been found when the house was cleaned out. Here is a passage never published that gives a glimpse of William’s need for writing:

Why you do it.

I don’t know. I don’t question all my motives. Why does the wind blow, the little dog laugh to see such sport. It’s just what I do. Why do people spend their entire lives in a factory making the same damn thing over and over, as if they never quite make it right.

Well, people have to live.

There you are then. I have to live.

William Gay

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