Newman, Charles 1938-2006
(Charles Hamilton Newman)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born May 27, 1938, in St. Louis, MO; died of heart failure, March 15, 2006, in St. Louis, MO. Editor, educator, and author. Newman was an English professor and author best known for his years editing the literary journal TriQuarterly. Earning a degree in American studies from Yale University in 1960, he attended Balliol College, Oxford, for a year to study politics and economics. From 1962 to 1963, he was an administrative assistant to Illinois Congressman Sidney R. Yates, before serving in Vietnam as a medic with the U.S. Air Force Reserve. After his tour of duty, he tried his hand at writing an experimental novel, which was published in 1966 as New Axis; or, Little Ed Stories: An Exhibition. Joining the Northwestern University faculty as an English instructor in 1963, Newman would soon be involved in his most important work. He took the university's faculty periodical and, as editor, transformed it into one of the most respected literary journals in the country: TriQuarterly. Publishing the works of such cutting-edge writers as Jorge Luis Borges and Sylvia Plath, Newman strove to bring the highest quality fiction and poetry to his readers. Often, he would devote entire issues of the periodical to specialized subjects, such as "Contemporary Israeli Literature," that not only challenged his readers but the editor himself. Newman headed TriQuarterly until 1975, when he moved to Johns Hopkins University, but still served as a consulting editor until 1980. AtJohns Hopkins he was a professor and chair of The Writing Seminars for three years. His last post was as an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he worked from 1983 until his death. As an author himself, Newman was known for his attempts to stretch the boundaries of experimental fiction, and his works have been compared to the writings of such authors as Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon. Among his other fiction pieces are The Promisekeeper: A Tephromancy (1971), There Must Be More to Love Than Death: Three Short Novels (1976) and White Jazz (1984). He was working on an ambitious trilogy about a fictional country at the time of his death; Salmagundi editor Robert Boyers has been selected to complete the work for posthumous publication. The winner of the 1975 Zabel Prize for Innovative Writing from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Newman was also a noted literary critic whose thoughts on the state of contemporary fiction are expressed in his The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation (1985).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, March 26, 2006, p. B12.