Joanna Scott (born June 22, 1960) is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Her award-winning fiction is known for its wide-ranging subject matter and its incorporation of historical figures into imagined narratives.
A native of Darien, Connecticut, Scott graduated from Trinity College in Hartford and earned a master's degree from Brown University. In addition to her work as an author, she has had a career in academia, teaching at the University of Maryland and the University of Rochester, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1988.
Scott is currently the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester. She lives in Rochester, New York.
Biography
Early life
Joanna Scott was born on June 22, 1960, the youngest child of Walter Lee and Yvonne Scott. She was raised in Darien, Connecticut, with her three older brothers. Her father worked in advertising, and her mother was a psychologist for the school system in Stamford, Connecticut. Scott has described her childhood as one of extraordinary freedom but also isolation, both of which nurtured her imagination. As a student at Darien High School, she encountered the novels of William Faulkner, which she has described as an "unsettling" experience that prompted her first attempts at writing fiction.
After taking a bus trip across the United States, Scott enrolled at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where she majored in English and studied under the author Stephen Minot. She spent one semester in Rome and one academic year at Barnard College before graduating in 1983. She then spent a year as an assistant at a literary agency in New York City before enrolling in the Creative Writing Program at Brown University, where she studied with the authors Susan Sontag, Robert Coover, and John Hawkes. After earning her master's degree in 1985, she stayed at Brown for a year as a teaching fellow.
Career
Scott began writing her first novel, Fading, My Parmacheene Belle, while at Brown University. It was published in 1987. Writing in The New York Times, Nancy Ramsey called it a "remarkably inventive first novel" that was moving and wise. In a separate review in The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt criticized the novel's plot, but praised the "mad eloquence" of its prose.
At the time of her first novel's publication, Scott was an instructor at the University of Rochester. She then joined the faculty, as an assistant professor, at the University of Maryland, College Park, for the 1987-88 academic year. In 1988, she rejoined the faculty of the University of Rochester as an assistant professor in the English department.
In 1988, Scott's second novel, The Closest Possible Union, was published. Narrated by a teenaged boy, it tells the story of the violent voyage of a slave ship. Publishers Weekly declared that the "Kafkaesque" story "demonstrates conclusively that modern literature has a major new voice". However, the author Robert Houston found the novel disappointing, writing in The New York Times that it suffered from a disconnect between its language and its material.
Scott's third novel, Arrogance, appeared in 1990 to mixed reviews. A fragmented, fictional account inspired by the life of Austrian artist Egon Schiele, it was criticized in Publishers Weekly as reading like "an innovative treatise". Writing in The New York Times, the author Scott Bradfield also classified the work as "more…a treatise than a novel", although he praised its "vivid" use of "sensuous, provocative" material. However, Entertainment Weekly gave the novel an 'A' grade, and, writing in The Washington Post, J. D. McClatchy called it "a convincing portrait of tortured artistic genius and a dazzling literary performance".
In 1994, Scott released a collection of stories, Various Antidotes. This was followed by another novel, The Manikin (1996), a gothic story set in western New York. In the Los Angeles Times, Anna Mundow praised the novel's "feverish, hermetically sealed atmosphere", although she criticized its portrayal of its characters. Calling it "richly atmospheric", Kirkus Reviews declared that the novel "splendidly reinforces Scott's reputation as an original and imaginative writer". In The New York Times, Peter Prescott compared Scott's prose to the Metamorphoses of Ovid. The novel went on to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1997.