JF Powers

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JF (James Farl) Powers (born July 8, 1917 in Jacksonville , Illinois , † June 12, 1999 in Collegeville , Minnesota ) was a Roman Catholic American writer .

life and work

Powers wrote novels and short stories mostly related to life in the Catholic Church of the Midwestern Americas; often its protagonists are priests . Powers wrote few works in his life, but earned a very good reputation in literary circles in the United States and England. He is considered a master of satire and the representation of the Catholic culture of America after the Second World War up to the Second Vatican Council and beyond. Flannery O'Connor , Evelyn Waugh and Walker Percy praised his work in interviews, and in 1999 Frank O'Connor declared him "one of the greatest living storytellers." Powers received the National Book Award in 1963 for his first novel Morte d'Urban .

Power grew up in a Catholic home and attended Catholic schools. Some of his classmates became priests, but he claimed that he had never heard of a priestly calling. He made his first experiences as a writer during a retreat course. Snapshots of a "clerical idiom" of his time are preserved in his dialogues. The collection of short stories published in 1947 under the title Prince of Darkness and Other Stories set the tone that Powers has set throughout his life. Five of the eleven stories had a Catholic priest as their main character, who was either terminally ill or apostate. The tension between the idealistic, pure religious approach and the reality of the lived priestly vocation in conversation with superiors, in behavior in the sacristy and in the life of the parsonage has repeatedly preoccupied Powers. He sought the perspective of those who were passed over or oppressed; there are often discriminated black Americans.

In his second novel, Wheat , Powers depicts a priest entering the seminary and then back as an old man. When entering it says: Holiness, it was the only ambition that was worthwhile for the priest and therefore for the seminarians. Holiness was the goal in the life of all saints and the point where the life of all glorious saintly lives came together and that which the whole world cries for. After many years as a priest, Father Joe says: Despite everything, you never really know how far you have come in your spiritual life; that's the hell of it - only God knows.

As a conscientious objector in World War II, he had to endure one year imprisonment. After his release in 1944, he worked as a nurse. In a phase that lasted about 20 years, beginning in 1951, he and his family moved frequently between Ireland and the United States. His work has been published in The New Yorker and in smaller literary periodicals. He was last professor of English and penmanship at Saint John's University in Collegeville , where he died. In 1968 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1997 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Publications

  • 1947 - Prince of Darkness and Other Stories
  • 1949 - Cross Country. St. Paul, Home of the Saints.
  • 1962 - Morte d'Urban
  • 1963 - Lions, Harts, Leaping Does, and Other Stories
  • 1969 - The Presence of Grace
  • 1975 - Look How the Fish Live
  • 1988 - Wheat that Springeth Green
  • 1991 - The Old Bird, A Love Story
  • 1999 - The Stories of JF Powers

literature

  • Kenneth Jackson (Ed.): The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives (Vol. 5, 1997-1999), p. 456. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0684806630 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mel Gussow (June 17, 1999). "JF Powers, 81, Dies; Wrote About Priests" . The New York Times
  2. ^ Members: JF Powers. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 20, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Powers, JF
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Powers, James Farl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Jacksonville , Illinois
DATE OF DEATH June 12, 1999
Place of death Collegeville , Minnesota