Hilary Masters

Hilary Thomas Masters was born in Kansas City, Missouri on February 3, 1928. He attended public schools in Kansas City until his junior year of high school. He finished high school at Brewster Free Academy, Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, in 1944.

He attended Davidson College in North Carolina for three terms before enlisting in the U.S. Navy in January, 1946. He served as a Naval Correspondent, working out of the Navy Public Relations Office in Washington and covering special stories such as the V2 rocket launch from the carrier MIDWAY. He was honorably discharged from the service. He worked on The Washington Daily News as a copy boy and junior reporter before going back to school, this time at Brown University, from which he graduated in 1952.

Next he worked in a New York City theatrical press agency whose clients included Martha Graham, Sylvia Marlowe, Jose Limon, and The Ballet Monte Carlo. He established his own press agency, handling Off-Broadway theatres and both summer and winter stock companies.

In 1956, he established The Hyde Park Record, a weekly newspaper in Hyde Park, New York. Eventually, he sold his newspaper and the small printing business attached to it to devote himself full-time to writing.

Hilary Masters’ first publications, a poem and a short story, appeared in The Quarterly Review of Literature in 1963. Poems and stories followed in journals in both the United States and Ireland. Altogether he has published eight novels, two collections of fiction, a memoir and a collection of personal essays.

Masters’ first novel, The Common Pasture, was published by Macmillan in 1967. Subsequent novels are: An American Marriage, Macmillan, 1969; Palace of Strangers, World, 1971; Clemmons, David Godine, 1985; Cooper, St. Martin’s, 1987; Manuscript for Murder, under the pseudonym, P. J. Coyne, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1987; Strickland, St. Martin’s, 1990; Home Is the Exile, Permanent Press, 1996.

The first collection of short fiction, Hammertown Tales, was published by Stuart Wright in 1986. New and selected fiction was published under the title, Success, by St. Martin’s in 1992.

Perhaps Masters’ best-known work is the memoir, Last Stands: Notes from Memory, published by David Godine in 1982. The most recent book is also a work of non-fiction. It is a collection of essays titled In Montaigne’s Tower and was published by the University of Missouri Press, February, 2000.

Both fiction and non-fiction have been extraordinarily well received. The Boston Globe called Last Stands “an American Classic;” The Chicago Tribune called it “a beautifully written rendering of no less than a century of American life.” “Mr. Masters is a compelling writer,” The New Yorker reviewer wrote of the novel Clemmons; The Chicago- Tribune declared, “Masters flies high with Cooper.” The New York Times reviewer called the story collection Success “erudite, engaging, and lovingly detailed. . . almost old-fashioned in its pleasures.”

Masters began taking teaching appointments as a visiting writer in 1975. He has taught at Drake University, Clark University, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Ohio University, Denver University, and, on a Fulbright lectureship, the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. He joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University in 1983. He is a Full Professor of English and Creative Writing.

Masters’ short fiction has been cited in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He has recently been awarded the Balch Pprize for fiction and the Monroe Spears Prize for the essay. His work has essays have been anthologized in The Best Essays of 1998(Anchor-Doubleday), edited by Phillip Lopate, and in The Best American Essays of 1999 (Houghton Mifflin), edited by Edward Hoagland and Robert Atwan.

The Yaddo Foundation granted Masters fellowships in 1980,1982, and most recently, in 2000, The Readers Digest Residency for Distinguished Authors. In 2003, the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave his work its Award for Literature.

His 1982 family memoir, "Last Stands:Notes from Memory" is to be republished by Southern Methodist University press in the fall of 2004 with an introduction by Phillip Lopate and an afterword by the author.

He is married to the writer Kathleen George. He has three children from a previous marriage and one grandchild.