Larry Woiwode (1941 - 2022) was a novelist, essayist, and poet. He was the author of five novels, two collections of short stories, +a biography of Gold Seal founder and entrepreneur Harold Schafer entitled Aristocrat of the West, a book of poetry titled Even Tide, reviews, and essays that have appeared in dozens of publications. Woiwode, who was in residence in 1965, has been North Dakota’s Poet Laureate since 1995. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Gentleman's Quarterly, The Partisan Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, and The Paris Review. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he met his future wife, Carole Peterson, Woiwode studied acting, Shakespeare, rhetoric and composition.
He moved to New York at the age of 24, reportedly living in an East Village room on beer and candy bars, and the sandwiches New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell brought to their story meetings in Central Park. In 1969, his first novel, What I’m Going to Do, I Think, won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the most notable first novel of the year and was a finalist for the National Book Award. With a career on the way, newly married Woiwode moved to Brooklyn Heights. His neighbors were Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, and Robert De Niro was a drinking buddy. Robert De Niro Sr., an artist, painted Woiwode’s portrait. His next book, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, was a 600-page saga about four generations of a North Dakota farming clan, and its epic sweep, language, and themes drew comparisons to Dickens, Melville, and Tolstoy and took five years to write. But the writing of the book that established Woiwode’s place in American letters nearly broke him, according to his wife, and the glare of living in the New York literary world became too much. 1978, the Woiwode’s bought a 160-acre farm 12 miles from the nearest tiny town in North Dakota and embarked on a much different, and hazardous, life in the West. Woiwode taught creative writing and literature at various colleges and universities, and most recently, was a writer in residence at the University of Jamestown and the University of Mary, both in North Dakota.
In 1982, Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post called Beyond the Bedroom Wall one of the 20 best books of the 20th century, listing it alongside Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
