LARRY WOIWODE, WHO WROTE OF FAMILY, FAITH AND RURAL LIFE, DIES
Larry Woiwode, the author of lyrical, expansive novels, short stories, poems and essays — mostly planted in the American West — that explored the power of place, family ties and faith, spiritual and otherwise, died April 28 in Bismarck, N.D. He was 80.
His son, Joseph, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but did not specify a cause.
Woiwode’s 1975 novel, “Beyond the Bedroom Wall,” a 600-page saga about four generations of a North Dakota farming clan, established his place in American letters. For its epic sweep, elegant language and essential themes, he was compared to Charles Dickens, Herman Melville and Leo Tolstoy.
Novelist John Gardner, writing in The New York Times, called it a “brilliant solution” to the aesthetic problems raised by the modernist authors who were then upending traditional structure and their aversion to “plain, grown-up talk about love and death.”
“It seems to me,” Gardner added, “that nothing more moving has been written in years.”
In 1982, Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post called “Beyond the Bedroom Wall” one of the 20 best books of the 20th century. Among the other names on his list were Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
“The Great Gatsby.”
It had taken Woiwode (pronounced Why-woody) more than five years to write the book — although his wife, Carole Woiwode, said it felt like 10 — and the effort nearly broke him. It undid their marriage for a time, along with their finances and his health.
For a decade, he had been teetering on the edge of literary stardom. His mentor was William Maxwell, the gentle New Yorker fiction editor who had nurtured John Cheever, J.D. Salinger, Shirley Hazzard and John Updike — the literary lions of postwar America — and who, like Woiwode, had grown up in a small town in Illinois and had been educated at the state university’s Urbana-champaign campus.
Maxwell was Woiwode’s lodestar and protector when at 24 he moved to New York City, where he lived on beer and candy bars in a room on St. Marks Place in the East Village that rented for $9 a week, and on the sandwiches Maxwell would bring to the lunches they shared on benches in Central Park.
His first novel, “What I’m Going to Do, I Think,” was a meditation on love — the story of a young couple’s moral and emotional quest, set in a lodge on a Michigan lake where they have gone for their honeymoon. It won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the most notable first novel of the year.
Woiwode’s books included five novels, two collections of short stories, two memoirs, a collection of essays about the Bible and a collection of poetry, “Even Tide,” published in 1979.