John J. Clayton


John Jacob Clayton is an American fiction writer, teacher, and editor. He has published four novels including Mitzvah Man, and Kuperman’s Fire, as well as five collections of short fiction including Minyan: Ten Interwoven Stories and Many Seconds into the Future. He was editor for the Heath Introduction to Fiction, a college anthology published in six editions from 1977 to 1999.

Life

Clayton graduated from Columbia University with a B.A., New York University with an M.A. and Indiana University with a Phd. His doctoral thesis Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man, published by University of Indiana Press in 1968 was one of the first books of criticism of Bellow’s work. In the early 1960s Clayton taught at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, then in Germany for the University of Maryland in Europe. From 1964-1969 he lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, and taught at Boston University. In Fall 1969 he arrived at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where as professor he taught American and British modern literature and creative writing for over thirty years.

Fiction

Clayton’s early fiction rendered family life, separation, divorce and childrearing and their attendant tensions, heartbreak and growth. It also dealt with disillusion with political involvement as in his O.Henry prize-winning story "Cambridge is Sinking". Since the early 1990s Clayton’s novels and short stories have explored the universal themes of loss and spiritual redemption, acceptance, fading ideals, as well as with contemporary struggles of Jewish life and family. In 2016 Richard L. Rubenstein wrote of Clayton's collection of linked short stories: "If I were asked whether there is one single book I would recommend to anyone interested in learning about the world of contemporary American Jews, I would unhesitatingly recommend John J. Clayton’s Minyan. " Of the novel Kuperman's Fire Thane Rosenbaum wrote: "Clayton is a masterful observer of the modern world, with all its fears and neuroses—the threats that plague us from afar and from within, and the corruptions that contaminate not only our institutions, but also our spirits."
Clayton's fiction, literary criticism, memoir and journalism have appeared in a wide range of literary and popular magazines and newspapers including: Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, The Sewanee Review, The Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, The Antioch Review, Fiction, Witness, Playboy, Chronicle of Higher Education and The Washington Post magazine. Beginning in 2003 Commentary magazine has published over twenty of Clayton's stories and memoir pieces

Works

;Novels
;Short story collections
;Criticism and anthology