Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture
Thomas Wolfe Lecture 2024, Ben Fountain
On the strength of four great books – two novels, a short story collection, and a searing journalistic account of the 2016 presidential election – Ben Fountain has established himself as one of our country’s most important writers. At once literary, political, specific, and expansive, his work beautifully articulates through story the widening gulf between American ideals and reality. He has earned a place in a lineage of authors that includes Robert Stone, Joan Didion, Graham Greene, and John LeCarré.
Fountain’s contributions to our literature have not gone unnoticed. His books have received the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/ Hemingway Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and a Whiting Award, among many other honors. His novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Fountain graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1980, having studied under some of the brightest lights in the Creative Writing Program: Doris Betts, Marianne Gingher, and Louis Rubin. “Doris put me in the canoe with a paddle,” Fountain says, “and then Marianne gave me a big stiff push out into the current.” He wrote his senior thesis, directed by Louis Rubin, on the Fugitive poet Allen Tate.
“Greenlaw Hall formed me,” he says. “That is no exaggeration. My mind would be blown several times a week. It gave me a way to look at the world and start to articulate emotions and thoughts.”
Ben Fountain was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. He moved to Cary when he was thirteen. Upon graduating from UNC, he attended Duke Law School, after which he and his wife moved to Dallas. He was a successful lawyer for five years, but he could not escape his desire to write fiction. “I would never have any peace in myself if I didn’t make a serious attempt.”
So, in 1988 he quit his job and started writing. It took him ten years to write a story he thought was any good, and another seven before he got a contract for a book of stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (2006). In 2012, Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was adapted into a movie by Ang Lee. Beautiful Country Burn Again, a trenchant and prophetic collection of essays, came out in 2018, followed by his most recent novel, Devil Makes Three, in 2023.
That novel is set in Haiti, a country that has fascinated Fountain for most of his writing life. Between 1991 and 2016, he visited Haiti more than 50 times. “I started to get the sense that Haiti is the paradigm for how a lot of the world works. How it’s come to be over the past 500 years.” Like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and Randall Kenan’s Tims Creek, Fountain’s Haiti is a place where anything can happen, and it usually does. A national bestseller and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, Devil Makes Three was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post.
Email any questions to ECLevents@unc.edu
History of the Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture
The Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture honor the memory of one of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s most famous alumni, Thomas Clayton Wolfe (Class of 1920). Established in 1999 with an endowed gift to the Department of English, the program recognizes contemporary writers with distinguished bodies of work. And in doing so, the program seeks to give University students and the surrounding community the opportunity to hear important writers of their time.
The Department of English bestows this prize each fall, around the time of Wolfe’s October 3 birthday. In addition to receiving prize money and a medal, the honored writer comes to campus as the University’s guest and delivers a lecture, which is free and open to the public. This event is a well-attended major campus and community occasion.
Thomas Wolfe is best known for his novel Look Homeward, Angel, which was published to rave reviews in 1929. Before his death in 1938, Wolfe also published Of Time and the River (1935). His novels The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) were published posthumously. Wolfe’s writings reflect a largeness of spirit and an expansive vision of life, while anchored in geographic place.
Sponsors of the 2018 Thomas Wolfe Lecture are alumnus John Skipper (BA English 1978), The Thomas Wolfe Society, and the Department of English and Comparative Literature. The prize money comes from the Thomas Wolfe Endowment Fund. UNC Alumnus Ben Jones (class of 1950) gave the medals that each recipient receives.
Previous Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture Recipients
