An Interview with John McCluskey, Jr.
- An Interview with John McCluskey, Jr.
This interview was conducted by telephone, on January 19, 1997, between Bloomington, Indiana, and Charlottesville, Virginia.
I want to begin with your background and the early stages of your writing career. You were born into a working-class family in Middletown, Ohio, in 1944, and yet you did what very few of us black Americans of your generation—and earlier generations—did in terms of higher education: you studied at an Ivy League institution, Harvard University, and, when you completed the B.A. there, you went on to complete your graduate studies at Stanford University. Of course, this pattern is not uncommon today. What motivated you to select these institutions, and do you recall the source of your early interest in creative writing? What specifically led you to writing?
Well, it actually happened, I think, late. I went to an all-black elementary school in Middletown, Booker T. Washington Elementary School, which was right down the street in our neighborhood. Some of my family members had gone before. For example, Carrie Page was my third grade teacher, and she happened to be the grandmother of Clarence Page, the syndicated columnist. She had taught both my father and mother, as well as myself, and one of my younger sisters. It was and is fairly rare for a teacher to teach two generations of the same family. At any rate, it was about that time that I won an elementary school writing contest. The judge was a teacher who traveled from school to school in our school district. She taught art courses, for example, and creative writing courses. She was very encouraging. Still, I paid that not much thought, though I did read a great deal. I had always read a great deal. I had a voracious appetite.
I went off to college thinking I was going to come back to Ohio as a doctor or perhaps an aeronautical engineer. It was the era of Sputnik, you know. As it turned out, I majored in sociology or social relations, as it is called there. However, about my junior year I took a writing course and I received a great deal of encouragement there. I took a number of literature courses my last two years. I figured out a way on my undergraduate honors thesis to bring sociology and literature together. So I did a study of Ellison, Baldwin, Chester Himes and Richard Wright that was called “The Sociology of Literature.” I looked at their works, and tried to figure out how their literature, their fiction, treated institutions such as colleges, high schools, families and religion and so forth. On the strength of that first fiction writing course, I took an advanced fiction writing course my senior year. After that I’d try to just see if I had [End Page 911] the stuff, so to speak. So I applied to one graduate school in creative writing; that was Stanford. I was fortunate enough to get in, and I had a very productive year in California. Then I went South without the graduate degree to my first full time position. So I guess it wasn’t until I was about 20–22 that I began to take writing as a career fairly seriously, though, like most people who write, you have to do something else to be able to eat. And I happened to discover in Birmingham, Alabama, that I had a passion for teaching.
Getting to Harvard is a long story I will try to keep short. One summer one of my history teachers was leading a class on the American colonial period. He talked about the founding of early colleges and mentioned Harvard. In his off-handed way he said something like, “Well, I doubt if anybody in this room will get to Harvard.” That piqued my curiosity and before long, Harvard promotional materials in hand, I announced to my mother that in two years or so I would be applying to Harvard. I later told my father the same thing. In silence they looked at the tuition costs, looked back at me and smiled. They never said “impossible.” My...
