Writer Stephen Dixon (1936-2019) wrote realistic fiction that reflected the heartbreak of everyday life. After high school, Dixon studied in a pre-dental program at the City College of New York, but he did not enjoy science and instead went on to earn a bachelor’s in international relations. After graduation he moved to Washington, where he worked for pulp crime magazines and as a radio reporter. Later, back in Manhattan, he was an editor at CBS News.
While he didn’t publish his first novel until 1976, in 1963 he published his first short story, "Chess House," in The Paris Review. Working on a portable typewriter, he would publish 18 novels and about 600 works of short fiction during his career. The last story Dixon published, “80,” came out in Heavy Feather Review in October while the author was in hospice. According to The New York Times, “Dixon tinkered with syntax and diction and used an array of narrative tricks that made his fiction compelling, but sometimes challenging.” He was nominated for the National Book Award twice, in 1991 for Frog and in 1995 for Interstate. In his review of Frog, The New York Times critic Alan Friedman wrote, “One doesn’t exactly read a story by Stephen Dixon, one submits to it. An unstoppable prose expands the arteries while an edgy, casual nervousness overpowers the will.”
He started teaching at the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 1980 and remained there until he retired in 2007. In addition to his MacDowell Fellowship, Dixon also won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction, the O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize. During his MacDowell residency, it is likely that he worked on the novel Tisch.
