Obituary Note: Brad Watson

Brad Watson, an award-winning author and director of the University of Wyoming's creative writing program, died July 8. He was 64. Watson published four books, including his 2010 short story collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; The Heaven of Mercury (2002), a National Book Award finalist; Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories (1996), which won the Academy of Arts and Letters award for first fiction; and Miss Jane: A Novel (2016), longlisted for the National Book Award.

Author David Gessner observed that Watson "will be remembered by family and friends for his sense of humor, his keen intelligence, his honesty, his empathy, his sheer authenticity, and his smile, which was often sly as if he were up to something. For his friends, the only thing better than reading Brad's stories was listening to them: tales that gradually wound their way through many twists and turns, and were delivered in a gravely but gentle voice tinged with a Mississippi accent, one that he claimed to have lost when he headed to Hollywood as a young man to become an actor."

In a tribute on Lit Hub, Norton executive editor and v-p Alane Salierno Mason wrote: "He was my first Norton author. I had fallen for his short story, 'Seeing Eye' as a consulting editor at the old Story Magazine, while a young editor at the old Harcourt Brace, and begged to see more of Brad Watson's work. When the collection came, and made my hair stand on end (with that proverbial prickle at the back of the neck that we editors are supposed to feel encountering realness on the page), I was about to accept a new job at Norton. I asked him to wait for me, and he did.... All four of his books were with Norton, a relationship that lasted 26 years. I was lucky to be in a place that made that possible.... Everything the guy published was prize-worthy. He wrote like a composer, every note held for just the right amount of time to make music."

Author Tim Parrish told the Tuscaloosa News that Watson was "an astonishingly talented writer.... I believe that most narratives create a story line that narrows into a finite, inexorable number of endings that make sense, but Brad's work often went to unexpected places that were more profound than anything remotely predictable, and yet still logical. He was tapped into the deeply human and visionary.... He had his demons, for sure, and I don't know if some were to be reckoned with, but out of the attempt to reckon came some of the best American writing of our period."

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