A man of one book is easy to figure. So is a man of many books. It is the man of a few good books who is hard to pin down. Take J. F. Powers. By the age of forty-five, Powers had written a grand total of three books: Prince of Darkness, published in 1947; The Presence of Grace, published in 1956; and Morte d’Urban, published in 1962. Still, his gifts were acknowledged by critics ranging from Evelyn Waugh to Gore Vidal, and he was regularly mentioned in tandem with Flannery O’Connor as one of the most promising young Catholic writers in America. When Morte d’Urban, Powers’s first novel, won the National Book Award in 1963, F. W. Dupee, another critical admirer, rightly remarked that its author enjoyed “an inconspicuous fame.”
That fame trailed off to next to nothing in the succeeding quarter century, during which Powers published only one other book, a slender collection of prose sketches and work in progress called Look How the Fish Live. No selected essays, no collected letters, no regular appearances on the campus lecture circuit, no groaning casebooks of close readings appeared in the wake of Morte d’Urban. Powers allowed his reputation, such as it was, to be sustained solely by four books published roughly a decade apart. Not surprisingly, he soon became a ghostly figure.
Why has J. F. Powers published so little?
Why has J. F. Powers published so little? Back in
