Gail Godwin (born June 18, 1937) is an American novelist and short story writer. Godwin has written 14 novels, two short story collections, three non-fiction books, and ten libretti. Her primary literary accomplishments are her novels, which have included five best-sellers and three finalists for the National Book Award. Most of her books are realistic fiction novels that follow a character's psychological and intellectual development, often based on themes taken from Godwin's own life.
Godwin was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but raised mostly in Asheville, North Carolina by her mother and grandmother. She adopted her mother's interest in writing at an early age and obtained a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). After graduating, she worked briefly as a reporter for The Miami Herald, then traveled to Europe and worked for the U.S. Travel Service run by the U.S. Embassy in London. She returned to the U.S. after six years. Godwin taught English at the University of Iowa, while earning her M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1971) in English Literature.
While at the University of Iowa, Godwin's dissertation became her first novel, The Perfectionists. By 1976 she had become a successful writer and author of three books. In particular, two books written by her in the 1980s, A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) and A Southern Family (1987), resulted in further acclaim and expanded the readership of her books. Following The Finishing School (1984), readership of her books dramatically declined until 2006, when Queen of the Underworld was published. Flora (2013) became one of her more commercially successful novels.
Early life and family Gail Godwin was born on June 18, 1937, in Birmingham, Alabama. Her parents, Kathleen Krahenbuhl and Mose Winston Godwin, were both from North Carolina, but visiting cousins in Alabama when Godwin was born. Godwin's parents divorced two years later. After the breakup, Gail and her mother moved in with her grandparents in Durham, North Carolina. They moved again to Weaverville, NC and then to Asheville, NC. Her grandfather died in 1939, so Godwin was raised by her mother and grandmother in Asheville, where they lived until 1948.
Godwin's grandmother filled the traditional role of a mother, cleaning, cooking and sewing, while her mother was the breadwinner. Godwin's mother had a Bachelor's and master's degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She taught college-level English in the mornings, and worked as a reporter for a local paper, Asheville Citizen-Times, in the evenings. On the weekends she wrote love stories for magazines in New York. According to Godwin, growing up with two female guardians had an influence on her writing and her decision to become a writer. By age five she had started identifying with her mother's occupation as a writer more so than her grandmother's work. At nine years old Godwin wrote her first story, titled "Ollie McGonnigle".
In 1948 Kathleen married Frank Cole, a World War II veteran, and moved the family to Virginia. Godwin was further inspired by her mother's determination to continue writing after having a second child. According to Godwin, much of her time growing up was spent in the newsroom, where her mother worked. She also witnessed her mother's plays and novels being rejected. Godwin's autobiography creates the impression that much of her own writing was intended to accomplish the things her mother could not. As Cole's salary increased and he was able to support the family, Godwin's mother focused on being a wife and homemaker, eventually not writing at all.
In Godwin's late teens, her stepfather was working as a salesman and the family moved often. Godwin attended several different high schools, including an all-girls Catholic school, St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines. It was Godwin's favorite teacher at St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines who persuaded her to start keeping a personal diary. According to Godwin, she had a "church upbringing or convent school training." She attended church at St. Mary's and All Souls. She also wrote a short novel as a teenager.
Godwin had no relationship with her father, until the two re-connected at her high school graduation. Godwin's father then offered to pay for her college education. During her junior year in college, Godwin moved in with her father, who committed suicide later that year. Godwin's uncle and a half brother later committed suicide as well. Her mother died in a car accident in 1989.
Godwin attended Peace College in Raleigh, North Carolina from 1955 to 1957. She then transferred to University of North Carolina (UNC), where she attended from 1957 to 1959, graduating with a bachelor's degree in journalism. While in college she worked on The Otherwise Virgins, a novel her mother had written, but was unable to find a publisher for. In 1959 Knopf sent an agent to UNC to scout young writers. Godwin submitted a portion of her novel Windy Peaks for their consideration. The story was about the staff and guests at a resort hotel in the mountains. Her manuscript was rejected. Godwin also worked as a waitress at Mayview Manor at Blowing Rock, North Carolina during her sophomore and junior years.
Early work Godwin's first job out of college was at The Miami Herald, where she worked as a journalist for one year. There she met and briefly married photographer and co-worker, Douglas Kennedy. They were married in 1960 and divorced several months later in 1961. According to Godwin, she "worked very hard", but her stories were too "flamboyant" for the publication and she was fired. According to Contemporary Literary Criticism, she was incorporating too much human interest into the paper's stories, which were supposed to be factual. After briefly living with her mother again, Godwin moved to London to distance herself from a failed marriage and job.
In London Godwin worked for the U.S. Travel Service run by the American embassy from 1961 to 1965. Godwin said she was a "glorified receptionist," who was able to read books in secret while at work. Her cousin, who was the mayor of Weaverville, North Carolina, helped to get her the job. While she was employed by the embassy, Godwin completed a novel entitled Gull Key. Like many of her early works, the book focuses on a female character figuring out if marriage and being a parent is the life she wants for herself. Several publishers rejected the novel and the manuscript was lost when Godwin sent the only copy to a publisher that went out of business without returning it.
While in England, Godwin took a course in creative writing at the City Literature Institute, where she met her second husband, psychiatrist Ian Marshall. They were married two months later. The marriage was brief and they were divorced in 1966. After their breakup, Godwin returned to the United States. At age 29, she took a job as fact-checker in New York City for The Saturday Evening Post. She said the job was embarrassing, because she wanted to be a writer, as opposed to fact-checking the work of others.
At this point, a distant uncle of Godwin's died, leaving her an inheritance of $5,000. She used the money to apply to the Iowa Writers Workshop and, after being accepted, to move from New York to Iowa City in 1967. There Godwin met her teacher and future mentor Kurt Vonnegut. At Iowa, Godwin worked as an instructor while earning an M.A. and Ph.D. from the same university in 1968 and 1971 respectively. She began teaching Greek Drama, before earning a position teaching literature. By age 30, Godwin had written three novels, but was unable to get any of them published.
Author
Early published work According to The Asheville Citizen-Times, Godwin's first successful work was a 1969 short story in Cosmopolitan. Her first published novel was her dissertation written as graduate work at University of Iowa. It was published in 1970 and called The Perfectionists. The story was based loosely on Godwin's second marriage. It was accepted by Harper & Row in December 1968, while Godwin completing her graduate work. From 1971 on, Godwin earned a living through her work as a writer and augmented her income by means of intermittent teaching positions.
After completing her graduate work in 1971, Godwin spent two months at the Yaddo artist's colony in Upstate New York in 1972. There she wrote 100 pages of a novel called The Villain, which was never published. The work was scrapped, but ended up being part of the basis for The Odd Woman. According to author Jane Hill, it was while working on The Odd Women that Godwin transitioned from linear narratives to more complex structures where the plot interweaves past and present events.
It was at Yaddo that Godwin met composer Robert Starer and began a life partnership with him that lasted until his death in 2001. They moved to Stone Ridge, New York in 1973 and later built a house in Woodstock, New York, where Godwin continued her work from home. In addition to her books and short stories, Godwin wrote libretti for ten of Starer's musical compositions.
Height of Godwin's career By 1976 Godwin was a successful writer and novelist who had published three books: The Perfectionists, Glass People, and The Odd Woman. The Odd Woman was the longest and most widely recognized of the three. Several short stories by Godwin were published in prominent magazines like Harper's Esquire, Ms. and The Paris Review, where she was often featured on the cover. Godwin was awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1975–76) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1975–76).
Throughout her career, Godwin worked consistently with her agent, John Hawkins, but worked with several different publishing houses. Godwin's early books were published by Knopf. After the editor for The Perfectionists, David Segal, died suddenly of a heart attack, Robert Gottlieb from Knopf became her editor for her next four books. Godwin credits Gottlieb for much of the success of her early works. Later on, when Godwin's then-recent books were less widely read, USA Today commented that this could be in part because she was no longer working with Gottlieb. After Knopf, Godwin contracted with Viking, who offered larger advances and more publicity for her books.
During the years 1982 to 1991, Godwin produced another collection of short fiction and four more novels. According to Publishers Weekly, it was A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) and A Southern Family (1987) that substantially expanded her readership. These novels remained on bestseller lists for an extended period of time. Godwin's earlier works had sold an average of less than 8,000 copies, while A Mother and Two Daughters sold more than 1.5 million. It was the most popular of Godwin's early works and the first time she had written a narrative from the point-of-view of multiple characters. In 1987, Godwin was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for her work on The Southern Family.
By the early 2000s, five of Godwin's books had made The New York Times Best Seller list and three were finalists for the National Book Award.
Recent works By 1999 Godwin had published ten novels. In 2001, Godwin's partner, Robert Starer, died and she began writing a fictional story based on their life called Evenings at Five that was published two years later. In November 2004 Godwin signed a contract with the publisher Ballantine Books for her next four books.