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Guy DavenportGuy Mattison Davenport Jr. (1927-2005) was a famous North American writer, intellectual and teacher. Guy Davenport was born in the cotton town of Anderson South Carolina on 23 November 1927. His father was an agent for the Railway Express Agency. Davenport quit high school at age 14, because his unusual expressions and perception of the world caused his school teachers to think him 'slow'. Thereafter he was educated in English Literature, Classics and Art at Duke University, which had a better opinion of his talents. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College Oxford from 1948 to 1950, where he was taught Old English by professor J.R.R. Tolkien. At Oxford he wrote the first thesis on James Joyce (1950). After returning to the U.S. to serve in the U.S. Army at Fort Bragg (18th Airborne Corps: 1950-1952), he took his doctorate at Harvard University. He befriended Ezra Pound, after the poet was judged guilty of treason and incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, and subsequently Davenport wrote his Harvard dissertation on Pound's poetry (published as Cities on Hills in 1983). Davenport was best known for his neo-romantic 'Fourier-ist' short stories; he started writing these around 1970 but their publication in book form initially met with homophobic reviews. Among numerous literary awards, Davenport won a $365,000 MacArthur Fellowship ("Genius Grant") in 1990, and the Leviton-Blumenthal Prize for his poetry. Davenport describes the roots of his short stories in the essay Ernst Machs Max Ernst. Davenport was influenced by the fiction of Paul Goodman and, in turn, Davenport's work influenced the fictional 'texts' and poetry of Hakim Bey. He entered university teaching in 1961, and from 1963 to 1991 he served as Professor of English at the University of Kentucky; where he was a renowned teacher, and was remarkable among his students for refusing to drive a car. He was a good friend and mentor to his near neighbour in Lexington, Ralph Eugene Meatyard; in one of the last major projects before he died, Davenport put together the first major Meatyard retrospective exhibition, and contributed the introductory essay and interview to the accompanying book. Davenport and Meatyard were part of a circle of Lexington creatives, including Thomas Merton, Jonathan Williams, Wendell Berry and others. In 1998 Davenport became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died of lung cancer on 4 January 2005, aged 77.
Key works of fiction & poetry
TranslationsDavenport has published translations of Sappho, Anakreon, Heraklitos, Archilochus, Alkman and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Collections of criticism
Davenport also provided a number of important protective introductory essays, to books of work by artists such as Will McBride (Coming of Age), Paul Cadmus (The Drawings of Paul Cadmus), and his friend Ralph Eugene Meatyard. He also illustrated a number of books by other authors. Paintings & drawings
External links
Full bibliographies
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