Roy Blount Jr.

From Philosopedia

TENTATIVE - do not quote until approved

Roy Alton Blount Jr. (4 October 1941 - )

Blount, a freelance/self-employed writer, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of Roy Alton and Louise (Floyd) Blount.

At his website, Blount wrote about himself in the third person:

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of nineteen books, most recently Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans, which according to the New York Times "delivers the goods: a wild, unpredictable ramble through a wild, unpredictable town." He is a panelist on NPR's "Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me" and a columnist for The Oxford American. He was recently named president of the Authors Guild and elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

His twentieth book, Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South, was published by Knopf in May 2007. His biography of Robert E. Lee, part of the Penguin Lives series, has just come out in paperback.

His first book, about hanging out with the Pittsburgh Steelers, About Three Bricks Shy . . . And the Load Filled Up, now available from the University of Pittsburgh Press, was named one of the ten best sports books ever by Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post - and just recently called, by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, "the best of all books about pro football."

Norman Mailer said of his second book, Crackers, "Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I've read in a long time," and Time placed Blount "in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H.L. Mencken and W.C. Fields." Garrison Keillor said in The Paris Review, "Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth and soulful all in one sentence." Playboy said he was "known to the critics as our next Mark Twain." Whether, on the one hand, it is his place to quote these plaudits and whether, on the other hand, he feels that they are adequate, are questions not for him to answer at this time. He has been named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and a Literary Light by the Boston one, and he is a usage consultant to The American Heritage Dictionary.

Blount then describes being a panelist on National Public Radio and a writer for various journals, adding that he has jumped out of a plane, graduated (conditionally) from race-car driving school, scuba-dived with sharks, sung on stage (as a member of the authors' rock band Rock Bottom Remainders) with Bruce Springsteen and Stephen King, hit a game-winning Texas Leaguer (and had limes thrown at him) in Venezuela, caught catfish with his bare hands in Illinois; and ridden a camel in Kenya, a dolphin in the Florida Keys, an elephant in L.A.

Born to Southern parents in Indianapolis, he grew up in Decatur, Georgia. In 1953 he received his B.A. from Vanderbilt, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, and in 1964 his M.A. from Harvard. He served in the U.S. Army l964-66; was a reporter and columnist for Atlanta Journal and a part-time English instructor at Georgia State College, l966-68.

Blount lives in western Massachusetts and Manhattan. He is of painter Joan Griswold, father of social worker daughter Ennis, and of director-writer-actor-songwriter son Kirven (with whom he wrote and appeared in a five-minute film on extreme sports for ESPN).

In his novel, Be Sweet, A Conditional Love Story (1998), Blount relates having sung in Sunday school,

Red and yellow, black and white,

They are precious in His sight;

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

all the while wondering “Why did they teach us that song if they didn’t mean it?”

Life, he relates, consists of freeing one’s self from much of what is learned in childhood.