Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today

Steve Yarbrough: The Oxygen Man

Steve Yarbrough The Oxygen Man Thomas E. Dasher A Biographical Sketch Steve Yarbrough was born in Indianola, Mississippi, on August 29, 1956, the son of John and Earlene Yarbrough. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1979 and his master’s degree in 1981, both in English from the University of Mississippi, he completed his master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Arkansas in 1984. He then taught at Virginia Tech from 1984 to 1988 before he moved to California State University in Fresno, where he was the James and Coke Hallowell Professor of Creative Writing and directed the school’s master of fine arts program in creative writing. He is currently a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston. He lives with his wife in Stoneham, Massachusetts. During 1999–2000, he served as the Grisham writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi, and he received the 2010 Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence. Influenced by Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Larry McMurtry, William Trevor, James Salter, and Alice Munro, among others, Yarbrough published his first collection of short stories, Family Men, in 1990. “The earliest of the eleven stories had actually been written seven years earlier, in the summer of 1983; the latest, two years earlier, the summer of 1988,” he noted in an interview . “So in a real sense the book was old to me by the time it appeared” (“Live E-Panel” 2005). Although it did not sell many copies, it was followed by two additional collections, Mississippi History in 1994 and Veneer in 1998. “My expectations [for Family Men], of course, were grossly unrealistic,” Yarbrough said. “I knew no better than to think that my university press collection would set the world on fire. I was convinced that it would be featured prominently everywhere from the New York Times Book Review to People Magazine. In fact, the only major reviews it received came in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe. It was blasted in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, in a review titled ‘Indianola Writer Goes One for Eleven.’ It sold about nine hundred copies, as best I recall” (“Live E-Panel” 2005). 92 Thomas E. Dasher Yarbrough’s first novel, The Oxygen Man, appeared in 1999 after having been “rejected 43 times over four years” (“Live E-Panel” 2005). It has been called “his finest novel to date and one of the best works of Southern fiction produced at the close of the twentieth century” (Guinn 2004, 584). In writing his first novel, Yarbrough commented that there “was a huge psychological hurdle when I tried to go from writing a short story to writing a novel. . . . You could be two or three years into it and realize, this isn’t working at all and you’ve wasted three years of your life. . . . In a novel, you have to learn to pace yourself, keep a foot on the break. That was probably the hardest thing to learn” (“Interview” 2008). Visible Spirits, Yarbrough’s second novel, published in 2001, is loosely based on an actual incident that occurred in Indianola in 1902 and 1903. But, as he commented, “I’m not a historian, and sticking to what really happened would have rendered me incapable of writing about character the way I wanted to. So I felt perfectly free to alter and invent and have done so liberally” (“Conversation ” 2008). Visible Spirits is set in Loring, Mississippi, Yarbrough’s fictional community, which is also the setting for his two following novels. Visible Spirits concerns two brothers, Tandy and Leighton Payne, their intense antagonism, and the effects of racism upon them as individuals and in the community. Both brothers are finally destroyed by their own actions, one noble, one despicable, and the community remains deeply divided and torn. Yarbrough noted that he hoped the Paynes’ struggles within Loring would force people to “spend a little time thinking about how difficult it sometimes has been, and indeed is even now, for some people in this very prosperous nation to go about the ordinary business of leading decent lives” (“Conversation” 2008). Prisoners of War, Yarbrough’s third novel, came out in 2004 and was a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award. Prisoners takes place during the 1940s. Dan Timms, the young protagonist, is waiting to be old enough to enlist in the Army and fight in World War II. But Dan is haunted by the memory of...