William Hoffman (author)
Encyclopedia
William Hoffman was an American writer who published thirteen novels and four books of short stories. He lived in Charlotte Court House, Virginia.
Hoffman was the recipient of the 1992 John Dos Passos Prize For Literature
. In 1996 he was awarded the O. Henry Prize. In 1999 he received The Dashiell Hammett Award for the book Tidewater Blood.
His short story "Dancer," published in The Sewanee Review won the Andrew Lytle prize and must be ranked with Katherine Anne Porter's "Jilting of Granny Weatherall" and Lytle's "jericho, jericho, jericho" in narrative form (a central intelligence omniscient narrator using a stream-of-consciousness style) and power of the written word. In "Dancer" not only did Hoffman succeed in writing one of the world's greatest short stories, said the critic F. Armstrong Green, but also in having written one of world literature's greatest sentences: "No use attempting to explain how the music came and went, the sound nothing like violins or saxophones but chiefly a feeling, if you could mix into melody the smell of hay curing, the whisper of the river dragging under willow branches, the taste of a freshly picked tomato still warm from the sun, the sense of a good horse under you, the sight of a spiraling hawk in a fresh summer sky, the touch of a loving man."
Short Stories
Nonfiction
Hoffman was the recipient of the 1992 John Dos Passos Prize For Literature
Dos Passos Prize
The John Dos Passos Prize is awarded annually to the best currently under-recognized American writer in the middle of their career.The Prize was founded at Longwood University in 1980 and is meant to honor John Dos Passos by recognizing other writers in his name...
. In 1996 he was awarded the O. Henry Prize. In 1999 he received The Dashiell Hammett Award for the book Tidewater Blood.
His short story "Dancer," published in The Sewanee Review won the Andrew Lytle prize and must be ranked with Katherine Anne Porter's "Jilting of Granny Weatherall" and Lytle's "jericho, jericho, jericho" in narrative form (a central intelligence omniscient narrator using a stream-of-consciousness style) and power of the written word. In "Dancer" not only did Hoffman succeed in writing one of the world's greatest short stories, said the critic F. Armstrong Green, but also in having written one of world literature's greatest sentences: "No use attempting to explain how the music came and went, the sound nothing like violins or saxophones but chiefly a feeling, if you could mix into melody the smell of hay curing, the whisper of the river dragging under willow branches, the taste of a freshly picked tomato still warm from the sun, the sense of a good horse under you, the sight of a spiraling hawk in a fresh summer sky, the touch of a loving man."
Novels
- The Trumpet Unblown (1955)
- Days in the Yellow Leaf (1958)
- A Place for My Head (1960)
- The Dark Mountains (1963)
- Yancey's War (1966)
- A Walk to the River (1970)
- A Death of Dreams (1973)
- The Land That Drank the Rain (1982)
- Godfires (1985)
- Furors Die (1990)
- Loud and Clear (1990) - co-authored with Lake Headley
- Tidewater Blood (1998)
- Blood and Guile (2000)
- Wild Thorn (2002)
- Lies (2005)
Short Stories
- Virginia Reels (1978)
- By Land, By Sea (1988)
- Follow Me Home (1994)
- Doors (1999)
Nonfiction
- Contract Killer: The Explosive Story of the Mafia's Most Notorious Hitman Donald 'Tony the Greek' Frankos (1993)