"The bottom line is, it's a great script and that's very inspiring and makes you want to overcome whatever technical difficulties you come up against." -- John Crowley
John Crowley (born December 1, 1942) is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and mainstream fiction. He studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer. He is best known as the author of Little, Big (1981), which received the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and has been called "a neglected masterpiece" by Harold Bloom.
"But I'm very happy to work within tight parameters, and when you know you have an actor for two days, and you have to get that work done in two days, that focuses the mind wonderfully.""Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.""Fundamentally, whether directing in the theatre or a film, you have to be a good storyteller, regardless of the form. The thing I had to work hardest at was thinking in shots.""I had very clever producers, who scheduled it brilliantly, but scheduling it was a nightmare."
John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 17th volume of fiction (Four Freedoms) in 2009. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s The 100 Best Novels. In 1981 came Little, Big.
In 1987 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaiano (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is in preparation for August 2010.
Crowley’s short fiction is collected in three volumes: Novelty (containing the World Fantasy Award-winning novella Great Work of Time), Antiquities, and Novelties & Souvenirs, an omnibus volume containing all his short fiction through its publication in 2004. A collection of essays and reviews entitled In Other Words was published in early 2007.
In 1989 Crowley and his wife Laurie Block founded Straight Ahead Pictures to produce media (film, video, radio and internet) on American history and culture. Crowley writes scripts for short films and documentaries, many historical documentaries for public television; his work has received numerous awards and has been shown at the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and many others. His scripts include The World of Tomorrow (on the 1939 World's Fair), No Place to Hide (on the bomb shelter obsession), The Hindenburg, and FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body (American fitness practices and beliefs over the decades; with Laurie Block).
Crowley's correspondence with literary critic Harold Bloom, and their mutual appreciation, led in 1993 to Crowley taking up a post at Yale University, where he teaches courses in Utopian fiction, fiction writing, and screenplay writing. Bloom claimed on Contentville.com that Little, Big ranks among the five best novels by a living writer, and included Little, Big, Ægypt (The Solitudes), and Love & Sleep in his canon of literature (in the appendix to The Western Canon, 1994). In his Preface to Snake's-Hands, Bloom identifies Crowley as his "favorite contemporary writer", and the Ægypt series as his "favorite romance...after Little, Big".
Crowley has also taught at the Clarion West Writers' Workshop held annually in Seattle, Washington.
Engine Summer, Doubleday (1979) -- BSFA and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards nominee, 1980
Little, Big, Bantam (1981) -- Nebula nominee, 1981; WFA winner, 1982; BSFA, Hugo, and Locus Awards nominee, 1982
Ægypt (first novel in the Ægypt tetralogy), Bantam (1987); revised and republished 2007 under intended original title, The Solitudes -- WFA and Clarke Awards nominee, 1988
Love & Sleep (second novel in the Ægypt tetralogy), Bantam (1994) -- WFA nominee, 1995
Dæmonomania (third novel in the Ægypt tetralogy), Bantam (2000)
The Translator, William Morrow (2002)
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, William Morrow (2005)
Endless Things (fourth and final novel in the Ægypt tetralogy), Small Beer Press (2007) -- Locus Award nominee, 2008
Four Freedoms, William Morrow (2009)
Short fiction
"Antiquities" (1977)
"Where Spirits Gat Them Home" (1978, later revised as "Her Bounty to the Dead")
"The Single Excursion of Caspar Last" (1979, later incorporated into "Great Work of Time")
"The Reason for the Visit" (1980)
"The Green Child" (1981)
"Novelty" (1983)
"Snow" (1985)
"The Nightingale Sings at Night" (1989)
"Great Work of Time" (novella, originally published in Novelty, 1989), Bantam (1991)
"In Blue" (1989)
"Missolonghi 1824" (1990)
"Exogamy" (1993)
"Gone" (1996)
"Lost and Abandoned" (1997)
"An Earthly Mother Sits and Sings" (2000, published as an original chapbook by DreamHaven, illustrated by Charles Vess)
"The War Between the Objects and the Subjects" (2002)
"The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines" (novella, 2002, in Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists, edited by Peter Straub)
"Little Yeses, Little Nos" (2005)
"Conversation Hearts" (2008; published as a chapbook by Subterranean Press)
Collections
Novelty Bantam (1989); collects "The Nightingale Sings At Night", "Great Work of Time", "In Blue" and the previously published "Novelty".
Antiquities: Seven Stories, Incunabula (1993); includes all of his stories to that point which were not included in Novelty
Novelties and Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction, Perennial (2004); collects all of his short fiction up to that point, including "Great Work of Time", except "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines".
Omnibuses
Beasts/Engine Summer/Little Big, QPBC (1991)
Three Novels (1994; later published as Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley. It includes The Deep, Beasts, Engine Summer).
Screenplays
The World of Tomorrow (1984)
Fit: Episodes in the History of the Body (1990, with Laurie Block)
Nonfiction
In Other Words, Subterranean Press (2007)
Audio books
Ægypt, Blackstone Audiobooks (2007; unabridged reading of The Solitudes by the author.)
Critical work concerning
Snake's-Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley, edited by Alice K. Turner and Michael Andre-Driussi, Cosmos (Canton, OH), 2003.
