John Crowley

Personal

Born December 1, 1942, in Presque Isle, ME; son of Joseph B. (a doctor) and Patience (Lyon) Crowley; married Laurie Block, 1984; children: two daughters. Education: Indiana University, B.A., 1964.

Addresses

Home— Box 395, Conway, MA 01341.

Career

Photographer and commercial artist, 1964-66; fiction writer and freelance writer for films and television, 1966—. Yale University, visiting professor of creative writing.

Awards, Honors

American Book Award nomination, 1980, for Engine Summer; Hugo Award nomination, Nebula Award nomination, and World Fantasy Award, all 1982, all for Little, Big; American Film Festival Award, 1982, for America Lost and Found; American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for literature, 1989; World Fantasy Award, 1990, for Great Work of Time; Locus award, for short story "Gone."

Writings

NOVELS

The Deep (also see below), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1975.

Beasts (also see below), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1976.

Engine Summer (also see below), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1979.

Little, Big, Bantam (New York, NY), 1981.

Ægypt (first novel in tetralogy), Bantam (New York, NY), 1987.

Great Work of Time (novella), Bantam (New York, NY), 1991.

Love and Sleep (second novel in tetralogy), Bantam (New York, NY), 1994.

Three Novels, Bantam (New York, NY), 1994.

Dæmonomania (third novel in tetralogy), Bantam (New York, NY), 2000.

The Translator, Avon (New York, NY), 2002.

Otherwise: Three Novels (contains The Deep, Beasts, and Engine Summer), Perennial (New York, NY), 2002.

OTHER

(Editor, with Howard Kerr and Charles L. Crow) The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1983.

Novelty (short stories), Bantam (New York, NY), 1989.

World of Tomorrow (screenplay), 1989.

Fit: Episodes in the History of the Body (screenplay), 1990.

Antiquities: Seven Stories, Incunabula (Seattle, WA), 1993.

Novelties and Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction, Perennial (New York, NY), 2004.

Work represented in anthologies, including Shadows, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1977, and Elsewhere, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1981. Author of television scripts for America Lost and Found and No Place to Hide, Public Broadcasting System. Contributor to periodicals, including Omni. Manuscript collection housed at the University of Texas, Austin.

Sidelights

Author John Crowley has been praised by critics for his thoughtful, finely wrought works of science fiction and fantasy, which include the novels The Deep, Little, Big, Ægypt, Love and Sleep, and Dæmonomania. A successful television writer who has never pandered to popular tastes, Crowley infuses his genre writings with literary quality and "mind-catching philosophical musings," according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer of Dæmonomania. Suzanne Keen reported in Commonweal that Crowley's characters "are psychologically convincing, an accomplishment that makes the historical and fantastic elements of his [novel Love and Sleep ] all the more thrilling." Whether his work visits far-off planets or local neighborhoods, some critics have suggested, Crowley always challenges the accepted perceptions of things and offers multi-layered mysteries for his characters—and his readers—to explore. As a Kirkus Reviews contributor explained it in a review of Dæmonomania, "Crowley's work is a taste well worth acquiring, but you have to work at it."

Born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942, Crowley attended Indiana University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1964. After working for a time as a commercial artist and photographer, Crowley began a freelance writing career in the mid-1960s. Over the years, he has written scripts for television and films, as well as novels and short stories.

Begins His Writing Career

The Deep, Crowley's first novel, is a science fiction tale borrowing from Celtic mythology. "Set in a distant future on a planet vaguely like earth," wrote an essayist for the St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, "The Deep describes the power struggle between two aristocratic houses with names derived from Celtic mythology, mostly old Welsh. Young Sennred, one of the Reds, eventually emerges as a victor who reconciles the impulsive Reds and the Machiavellian Blacks; but no particular hero predominates, and Learned Redhand, a scholarly apostate from the Reds, remains the most memorable character. The conflict is observed by an alien who assumes various guises, and eventually confronts his antagonist, a denizen of 'the deep' who is an avatar of the Leviathan myth." In a New York Times Book Review piece on The Deep, Gerald Jonas declared that "para-phrase is useless to convey the intensity of Crowley's prose; anyone interested in the risk-taking side of modern science fiction will want to experience it firsthand." Jonathan Dee noted, also in the New York Times Book Review, that Crowley "is an abundantly gifted writer, a scholar whose passion for history is matched by his ability to write a graceful sentence."

Beasts, Crowley's second novel, according to an essayist for the St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, deals "with a bitter ideological conflict in an America of the near future where central government has collapsed and small regional governments struggle to maintain their authority. Their opponents are the bureaucrats of 'the Federal,' a government striving to restore a dominating central authority. The surface conflict, however, symbolizes the perennial struggle between rational organizers who wish to subject nature and humanity to a monolithic tyranny and those romantics and lovers of nature who resist such dehumanizing efforts." An essayist for the St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers commented: "Crowley's first two novels—The Deep and Beasts, both perhaps definable as 'science fantasies'—while accomplished achievements in their own right, can best be seen as fledgling efforts toward the unique fusion of the supernal and the quotidian which he was fully to win in his next three books: Engine Summer, Little, Big and Aegypt. "

Some reviewers have observed that with his third novel, Engine Summer, Crowley began developing more complex plots and characters, and his themes reflected the influence of the fantasy genre. Engine Summer is, according to an essayist for the St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, "a story of a young man's initiation into adulthood in the primitive tribal world of a post-disaster America centuries hence. This book describes the search for meaning and understanding of Rush That Speaks, who leaves his community of origin as a boy and searches for his lost love, Once A Day. Although he finds her and some knowledge of the outside world, he discovers the unhappiness that accompanies the loss of innocence when she deserts him again. Crowley's hero also learns much about the vanished 20th-century civilization, the brave new world of science and technology called the age of the 'angels.' One of the lessons that Rush That Speaks learns is the 'angelism' or excessive rationalism of the ancients was anything but angelic in our sense of the word. An additional sign of Crowley's technical mastery in this novel is his use of an inventive narrative mode: Rush tells the story of his youth through a recording cube, and his auditor, who occasionally comments on his tale, is a person who lives generations after his death. This narrative method provides aesthetic distance." Reviewing Engine Summer, Charles Nicol in Saturday Review had much to praise: "A lyric adventure as concerned with the meaning of actions as with the actions themselves, [ Engine Summer ] presents a meditative world that should appeal to lovers of the great fantasies. Crowley has published some science fiction previously; here he has gone beyond his genre into that hilly country on the borderlands of literature."

Little, Big, winner of the World Fantasy Award, was described by John Clute in the Washington Post Book World as a "dense, marvelous, magic-realist family chronicle about the end of time and the new world to come." The essayist for the St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers explained that the novel "describes three generations in the life of the Drinkwater-Bramble-Hawksquill clan, as seen through the eyes of several members, but primarily from the point of view of two: Smoky Barnable, an outsider from the Midwest who comes to New York City and marries 'Daily Alice' Drinkwater; and Auberon, their son, who finally becomes an avatar of the fairy king, Oberon, just as his black paramour, Sylvie, is metamorphosed into a new Titania." According to the essayist in the St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, "Little, Big may be the best book Crowley will ever write. It is indeed hard to imagine a more satisfying work, both on an artistic and an emotional level. Composed from 1969 through 1978, it is the kind of definitive masterwork, which seems to contain everything the author thought or felt during the period of composition. Yet the book remains an integral organic whole constrained by an elaborate, over-arching mythos and symbolic architecture based on ancient notions of Faerie."

Novelist Carolyn See, in a review for the Los Angeles Times, commented that Crowley's fifth novel, Ægypt, contains "some extraordinary storytelling." Incorporating fantasy, satire, and philosophical romance, the novel centers on Pierce Moffett, a professor of Renaissance history in New York. "Aegypt is a tale woven of numerous poetic and occult materials: the Grail legend, the quests of Giordano Bruno, the adventures of the Elizabethan astrologer and occultist John Dee, a fanciful life of Shakespeare, and the quest of a modern Parsifal, Pierce Moffett," the essayist for the St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers explained. Washington Post Book World contributor Michael Dirda remarked that Ægypt "is clearly a novel where thought speaks louder than action, where people, places and events are at once actual and allegorical.…Crowley wants readers to appreciate his foreshadowings, echoes, bits of odd lore, multiple voices—in the evolution of complex pattern is his art." Dirda also noted, however, that Crowley's narrative is so complex that it can occasionally be confusing. Commenting on this complexity, John Clute, in a review for the New York Times Book Review, suggested that Ægypt provides "a dizzying experience." Ægypt is the first novel in an ambitious tetralogy centering upon the intellectual and personal journey of Moffett.

In Love and Sleep, Crowley continues the tale begun in Ægypt. While Ægypt tells of Moffett's life during the 1960s and 1970s, Love and Sleep frames that period, returning to the 1950s and allowing readers a glimpse of Moffett's Kentucky childhood, a time full of "minor incidents and wonders," according to Washington Post Book World critic Lawrence Norfolk, before leaping ahead of Ægypt in true sequel fashion. In the novel, Norfolk explained, Crowley hangs his plot upon the speculation that "between the old world of things as they used to be, and the new world of things as they would be instead, there has always fallen a sort of passage time, a chaos of unformed possibilities in which all sorts of manifestations could be witnessed." It has "an interim feel, a sense of its author treading water while the players are maneuvered into position" for the proposed third and fourth segments of the series, Norfolk continued. "As it stands, Love and Sleep is a collection of strange episodes, of hints and premonitions. The ultimate worth of this strange, teasing book hangs on the two yet to be written." Jonathan Dee had similar views in his assessment of the work for the New York Times Book Review: while the first section of Love and Sleep "generates a true, expansive sense of human mystery … the novel's own vision, so crystal clear in that opening section, grows woollier and more diffuse" as Moffett's saga continues. Chicago Tribune Books contributor Robert Chatain maintained that the author's mixture of realism and fantasy "is not for every reader," yet the critic added, "to dislike fantasy is not to dismiss Crowley; he's one of the few writers who successfully crosses the razor-thin but definite line between genre fiction and literary fiction." Citing the author's "metaphysical conceits," Chatain concluded of Crowley, "there is no temptation to confuse [his novels] with other fictions; there's really nothing like them."

If you enjoy the works of John Crowley

you might want to check out the following books:

Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair, 2002.

China Mieville, Perdido Street Station, 2001.

Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver, 2003.

Gene Wolfe, The Knight, 2004.

Dæmonomania continues the Pierce Moffett saga, as magic seeps further into the lives of Moffett and his acquaintances in Faraway Hills, New York. The title refers to a possible case of demonic possession, but the book portends even more massive shifts in what appears to be reality. For his part, Moffett comes to understand that magic once worked, that science has only temporarily halted the potency of magic, and that a "secret history," shared by a select few, actually directs the course of human actions. A Kirkus Reviews critic, while noting that the book will mean more to those who have read its two predecessors, called it "deeply atmospheric, impressively learned, endlessly suggestive." A critic for Publishers Weekly claimed that Dæmonomania "pushes fantasy fiction toward its most thrilling, intelligent heights." John J. Reilly, reviewing the novel for First Things: AMonthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, stated that "Crowley's blend of magic, blasphemy, and post-modernism works very well as fiction."

Crowley told Publishers Weekly writer Robert K. J. Killheffer that the tetralogy he began with Ægypt may ultimately be his life's work. "I find myself appalled every once in a while that I have committed myself to this thing that will take up a large part of what I realize to be a not-infinitely-long creative life," Crowley said. Nevertheless, he denied that he feels trapped by the work: "Pierce's story continues to show me new things; it keeps staying alive and interesting."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 57, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1982, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Analog: Science Fiction/Science Fact, June, 1977; August, 1987; December, 1989.

Atlantic Monthly, September, 1994, review of Love and Sleep, p. 112.

Berkshire Sampler, September 13, 1981.

Book, March-April, 2002, James Schiff, review of The Translator, p. 79.

Booklist, February 15, 2002, Ted Leventhal, review of The Translator, p. 990.

Commonweal, December 2, 1994, Suzanne Keen, review of Love and Sleep, p. 26.

Extrapolation, spring, 1990.

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, March, 2001, John J. Reilly, review of Dæmonomania, p. 53.

Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 1994, review of Love and Sleep; June 15, 2000, review of Dæmonomania, p. 815; February 1, 2002, review of The Translator, p. 121; March 1, 2004, review of Novelties and Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction, p. 194.

Library Journal, August, 2000, Rachel Singer Gordon, review of Dæmonomania, p. 168.

Locus, August, 1991; September, 1991; May, 2001, pp. 4-5, 66-67.

Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1987, Carolyn See, review of Ægypt.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April, 1980; December, 1987; January, 1992; June, 2002, Elizabeth Hand, review of The Translator, p. 42.

New Statesman, November 20, 1987.

New York Times Book Review, November 21, 1976, Gerald Jonas, review of The Deep; March 27, 1977; May 20, 1979; March 2, 1986; October 12, 1986; May 3, 1987, John Clute, review of Ægypt, pp. 9, 11; August 14, 1988; May 21, 1989; July 5, 1992; February 6, 1994, review of Antiquities, p. 22; September 4, 1994, Jonathan Dee, review of Love and Sleep, p. 9; September 17, 2000, Jeff Waggoner, review of Dæmonomania, p. 25.

Publishers Weekly, February 20, 1987; April 14, 1989; August 29, 1994, Robert K. J. Killheffer, "John Crowley: 'I Still Owe a Debt of Gratitude,'" p. 53; July 3, 2000, review of Dæmonomania, p. 53; January 14, 2002, review of The Translator, p. 38.

Saturday Review, April 14, 1979, article by Charles Nicol.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review, January-February, 1982.

Science Fiction Digest, January-February, 1982, Thomas Disch, interview with Crowley.

Times Literary Supplement, May 28, 1982; November 20-26, 1987, p. 1274.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), October 18, 1981; June 18, 1989, p. 6; September 11, 1994, Robert Chatain, review of Love and Sleep, pp. 1, 13.

Voice Literary Supplement, September, 1994, p. 31.

Washington Post Book World, March 23, 1980; July 26, 1981, article by John Clute; October 4, 1981; April 19, 1987, Michael Dirda, review of Ægypt, pp. 1, 7; March 19, 1989; December 6, 1992, review of Little, Big, p. 4; November 28, 1993, review of Antiquities, p. 8; July 10, 1994; August 14, 1994, Lawrence Norfolk, review of Love and Sleep, p. 5.*