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  • John O’Brien (1945–2020): A Most Subversive Man
  • Warren Motte (bio)

Yesterday evening, I attended a memorial service for my friend John O’Brien. It was both moving and bracing to hear so many people speak about him with such deep affection. Like every other event that we “attend” these days, in this crushingly lousy, godforsaken year of 2020, it was held on Zoom. That medium, as useful as it may have proved in last few months, is not one where I feel immediately comfortable, and yet last night I felt even more dislocated than usual. I finally realized that this time it was not Zoom’s fault; instead, it was occasioned by the fact that I am still shocked by John’s death. For in some sense I had never considered him as a mere mortal, had never consciously imagined the prospect of his death.


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John was a man of many parts. First and foremost, he was a committed, intrepid reader. Though by his own account, he came to reading fairly late, as a freshman in high school. There, a teacher introduced him to William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot. At the end of the school year, he gave John a reading list of a hundred titles, and John spent the next few years working through it (beginning with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot), with such singlemindedness that he largely neglected his social life. “I was searching for something, and I thought that literature was where I was going to find it,” he remarked recently. He would go on to teach literature at Illinois Benedictine College and Illinois State University. John was an early champion of African-American writers. His book Interviews with Black Writers, published in 1973 and still in print, includes conversations with seventeen authors, from Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison to John Wideman and Alice Walker. And he was also a novelist, though his manuscript, entitled The Man Who Arrived Home after a Trip to London and Was Greeted by His Wife (or Lover) at O’Hare, remains unpublished.

I knew John as a smart, curious, warm, engaging man. His kindness toward me was exceptional and unflagging. I was first in contact with him in the early 1980s, when we spoke about projects for The Review of Contemporary Fiction involving Italo Calvino, and then, a bit later, about Harry Mathews. He would subsequently invite me to contribute to the RCF, and to Context, and to play a role in the Dalkey Archive Press, advising him on French literature. He published many of my articles and book reviews, and several of my books. Equally important to me, he persuaded me that I had a home at Dalkey, and a significant role to play there, a precious thought for any academic. And I was not the only one in my family to feel that way: for several years my son Nicholas, a graphic designer, contributed cover art for Dalkey volumes, at John’s kind invitation. John’s sense of hospitality was boundless. And it was a joy to be around him, to chat with him, to argue with him. I remember our cheerful, running disputes about who was (at the time, of course) the most distinguished living writer of English, me arguing sometimes for William Burroughs, sometimes for John Barth, John, always and steadfastly, for Gilbert Sorrentino.

John founded The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1980, “out of a sense of isolation, as well as a kind of outrage at the fact that books and authors were reduced only to marketplace value.” He would later launch another publication, Context, a review intended for free distribution at bookstores and on college campuses. His intent in doing so was “to reach as many people as possible, especially college-age students and younger staff at bookstores, in other words people who are more or less just beginning their serious reading.” It was in 1984 that he founded the Dalkey Archive Press, with the idea of bringing important books back into print, and keeping them there. The Dalkey catalogue now contains many hundreds of titles from a staggering variety of...

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