John Casey, a writer of novels, essays and short stories, who won the National Book Award for “Spartina” in 1989, won the reviewer for his roughly winning the best American story of voyage life since Hemingway's “The Old Man and the Sea.”
His daughters Claire and Julia Casey said the cause was a complication of dementia.
Having spent most of her literary career as a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, Casey was best known for her pinpoint rendering of blue-collar characters like Dick Pierce, a Rhode Island sailor at the heart of “Spartina,” which the author calls “Swamp Yankee.”
The novel revolves around both the romantic intertwining of Pierced – married for a long time, he begins events, conceives his lover – and struggles to build his ship. Spartina, a sea grass, becomes the unified species of the book.
“Only Spartina, which flourished in the salt flood, hit salt, but drank water,” Casey wrote. “Smart glass. If he's ever built his big boat, he might call her Spartina, but he should call her after his wife.”
Susan Kenny, a novelist who writes in a review in the New York Times, is called the novel “beautiful thinking, perfectly rendering, and fully absorbing.”
Casey's National Book Awards victory was a surprise, beating heavy hitters like Amy Tan's “Joy Luck Club” and Eldcatoru's “Billy Bus Gate.”
“These five judges felt good,” he said at the awards ceremony. “That's why they were in my book mood.”
“Spartina” was Casey's third book, following the novels An American Romance (1977) and Testimony and Deenean (1979). He also wrote magazine essays about his love for outdoor life, especially running and rowing.
“John was a charismatic Lacontur, and I knew something about some things, especially everything and everything about writing,” actor and best friend playwright Eric Bogosian told me in an email. “I thought of him as a mentor.”
At the University of Virginia, Casey nurtured a reputation for generosity with his time and talent when teaching creative writing, and encouraged even non-students to submit materials to criticize him.
“If someone from the community appeared in chapter one in which they presented a promise, John read it,” Anne Beatty, a novelist who taught alongside Casey, said in an interview.
He continued to teach in Virginia until his retirement in 2018. However, he set out under the clouds.
In 2017, several former students filed another IX complaint against Casey, accusing him of sexual harassment, inappropriate emotionality and supporting male students in his class. The university panel recommended that he be fired, but retired instead.
John Dudley Casey was born on January 18, 1939 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and his father, Joseph, was a lawyer and representative of the democratic United States. His mother, Constance (Dudley) Casey, was a Democratic activist.
John grew up mainly in Washington, DC, but spent a year at Institut Le Rosey, a Swiss boarding school.
With the aim of chasing his parents into public service, he studied Russian history and literature at Harvard University. After he escaped to third grade, his father forced him to join the Army Reserve. He returned to Harvard, graduating in 1962, and then graduated from law school in 1965.
While in law school, he took a writing course with novelist and short story writer Peter Taylor, encouraging him to look at his promises and pursue fiction.
After practicing law for a year, Casey decided to follow Taylor's advice. He received a fellowship at the Iowa Writers Workshop and completed his Master's degree in 1968.
Among his classmates were Gale Godwin and John Irving, who found close teachers and friends at Kurt Vonnegut, a workshop instructor.
Despite Mr Casey's elite background, his friends said they could see the writers he would already become.
“I can't explain that, but even in Iowa there was something about Casey about a lonely and brave Mariner,” Irving wrote in an email.
Before graduating, Casey sold the two-storey building to New Yorkers and the other to a sports illustrator.
Rather than winning literary hotspots like New York, Massachusetts and Cambridge in March, he and his wife Jane, who married in 1967, purchased land on the island of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island.
He and his wife later divorced. He married Rosamond Pittman in 1982. They later divorced. He married Robin Frey in 2012. She passed away in 2015.
From his second marriage, along with his daughters Claire and Julia, he was survived by his first marriage, two daughters, Nell and Maud Casey. his sisters, Constance and Caroline Casey; Brother, Joe. and two grandchildren.
Casey moved to the University of Virginia in 1972 at Taylor's request.
Among Casey's early students was Blace da J. Pancake, a promising West Virginia author. Having established himself as a literary star almost immediately, Pancake published several stories in the Atlantic before committing suicide in 1979.
His death hit Mr Casey hard. In 1983 he edited “The Story of Breece D'J Pancake” and wrote the afterword.
Casey published three more fiction books after his outdoor writing collection, Spartina. Two translations of the book on the art of fiction, the first novel written in Italian, were what I learned in a fellowship in Rome.
