I told him I’d been sending things for years. He asked why I wasn’t sending them something because they’d like to publish my work. It was called “I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down.” They published him.Īfter I finally got published in the Georgia Review, I got a call from the editor at The Atlantic. He decided to try again.Īt age 55, he submitted a short story to the Georgia Review. For decades, he wrote at night and submitted stories to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Esquire. He served in Viet Nam and returned home to support his family through carpentry and other odd jobs. At age 15 he discovered the magic of words and knew he wanted to write, but it wasn’t part of his world.
William Gay was born the son of a sharecropper in Hohenwald, Tennessee. I found her short note so poignant, I went on a quest to discover more about him. He is being compared to Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner. He was first published at 55 years of age.
I had never heard of writer William Gay (1941-2012) until a reader, Diana, alerted me to his death:
