Background

Charles Alfonso Kinder II was born on October 8, 1946, in Montgomery, West Virginia, United States. He was a son of Charles Alfonso Kinder and Eileen Reba Kinder, maiden name Parsons. He grew up in West Virginia, which he said sometimes looked to him, on a map, like "a more or less anatomically correct representation of a lumpy, damaged human heart," writing poetry and listening to the great storytellers in his family - his grandmother and his aunts.

Education

Charles Kinder II earned a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1967 and a Master of Arts in English in 1968 from West Virginia University, where he wrote the first creative writing thesis in school history, which evolved into his first novel, Snakehunter. In 1973, he earned a Master of Arts in writing from Stanford University. At Stanford, his classmates were Raymond Carver and Scott Turow. Later, they became close friends.

Career

Before settling in Pittsburgh, a city he called "the Paris of Appalachia," in 1968-1970, Charles Kinder II worked as an instructor of English at Waynesburg College (now Waynesburg University). In 1973-1976, he was a Jones lecturer of fiction at Stanford University in Palo Alto. He was a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Davis in 1979, and at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa in 1980. In 1980, he became an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also served as the director of the creative writing program. Ed Ochester, department head at the time, hired him and found the department quickly benefited from his contacts as he brought in nationally known writers to meet and work with students.

Charles Kinder II is considered by many to be a throwback to the early 1960s pranksters such as Jack Kerouac and his group and is most closely related to Kinder's fellow-writer and best friend Raymond Carver, the noted short story author. Kinder's book, Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale, is based on Carver and Kinder's relationship, a story that took Kinder more than twenty years to write. Prior to Honeymooners, Kinder wrote two coming-of-age novels about a young boy in West Virginia, Snakehunter, and The Silver Ghost, both published under the name Chuck Kinder.

Kinder's unusual first novel, Snakehunter, chronicles the life of a young, fatherless, West Virginian boy by reminiscing through stories of his relatives and old fables and myths. Kinder uses the memories and fables to try to explain the joys and sorrows of life as experienced by a young boy moving toward adulthood. Kinder relates several deaths, beginning with the death of Speer Whitfield's, the protagonist's pet turtle, Snakehunter. Later, readers learn of the deaths of his father, sister, aunt, grandmother, and grandfather.

The novel The Silver Ghost is also set in West Virginia, and the protagonist, Jimbo Stark, is a troubled teen. Jimbo steals his father's miniature World War II soldier set to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend, and then the real trouble begins. He is kicked out of his father's house and sent to live with his grandmother. The distance between his grandmother's home and his girlfriend's leads to his losing her, and because of this loss, Jimbo becomes a rebel. Jimbo leaves West Virginia and hooks up with a gangster who sets him on a path of crime.

While at Pittsburgh, he began to try to capture the story of his relationship with Carver on paper. At one point, ten years before actual publication, Kinder had written almost three thousand words on the subject. "By the time Ray died in 1988," Kinder told in one of the interviews, "I had a stack of manuscripts. But I really got off track. I was too influenced at some points by academia, trying to be artsy-fartsy and write metafiction...At one point I looked at it and I thought, God, what is this, man? It's sort of "Ulysses" meets "Dune" - I even had science fiction crap in there." So Kinder put the manuscript away for five years. Then one day he took it out and started hacking away at it. On the advice of his friend Scott Turow, Kinder cut the material down to about nine hundred pages. Turow persuaded his publishers to look at the finished product, and out of that came Kinder's third novel, Honeymooners.

Honeymooners recounts the relationship between Kinder and Carver, their carousing, their marriages, their struggles with alcohol and drugs, and their early writing. Although the book is classified as fiction, Kinder confessed "the plotline kind of unfolds pretty much, I guess, as our lifelines." Nevertheless, Kinder stated that the book is "a work of imagination." He labeled it "faction," a cross between fiction and fact. The main characters in the book are Ralph Crawford (the Raymond Carver substitute) and Jim Stark (the Kinder alias).

Charles Kinder II wrote his last book, a collection of stories and myths about life in West Virginia, in 2009. Since his strokes, he concentrated on writing poems and published three collections, the last of which, Hot Jewels, was published in April 2018. With Hot Jewels, he lays out for us a subtle recollection of his life's passage. Movie, Myth, Fantasy, tales Cautionary and Redemptive, are combined in the book's carefully set 14 sections and 55 poems. Read from its first poem to its last, Hot Jewels has the feel of especially comic, erudite and literate Free-Form Radio at the same time as its word-selection and line-breaks are lapidary like Chekhov's, Emily Dickinson's, Marianne Moore's, and A.R. Ammons.

Achievements

• In 1971, Charles Kinder II was awarded the Edith Mirrielees Writing Fellowship to Stanford University, followed by the Jones Lectureship in Fiction Writing. He was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and Yaddo's Dorothy and Granville Hicks Fellowship.
  
  As a professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh for more than three decades, Kinder II helped foster the careers of Michael Chabon, Earl H. McDaniel, Chuck Rosenthal, Gretchen Moran Laskas, and Keely Bowers. His most famous writing student was Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whom Charles Kinder II taught as an undergraduate in the 1980s. Kinder is thought to have inspired the fictional Grady Tripp, the disheveled, pot-addicted writer, and professor at the center of Chabon's 1995 novel Wonder Boys. The novel was adapted into the 2000 film directed by Curtis Hanson and starring Michael Douglas as Tripp.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Snakehunter

    (This novel is the deeply moving coming-of-age story of Sp...)

    1973
  • Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life

    (On sabbatical from his professorship at the University of...)

    2004
  • Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale

    (Chronicles the misadventures of promising writers Ralph C...)

    2001
  • The Silver Ghost 1979

Politics

Charles Kinder II supported democratic views.

Personality

Talking about Charles Kinder II, everyone who knew him named the same personal qualities: friendly, kind, and sociable.

Quotes from others about the person

• In 2014 on the occasion of Charles Kinder's II retirement from teaching, Richard Ford, a novelist, told: "In a sense, his "outlaw" persona, while it's in part a way of camouflaging himself away from preciousness and self-regard, is also completely earned, in artistic terms. Somewhere back in the blear past, Chuck might have known some rules about how novels ought to be framed, but he pretty quickly went beyond the rules and found forms and fascinations and imperatives that suited what he thought was important to write."
  
  April Smith, a novelist and screenwriter: "[Kinder's] work was and remains outstanding and fresh. He was a born storyteller with an instinct for myth, which was not exactly in favor compared to pared-down modernists like John Updike. His work is important for its bold original voice and synthesis of elegant literary style with genuine feeling and down-home observation."
  
  Carl Kurlander, a television writer, producer and screenwriter: "When I first came back to Pittsburgh for what I thought would be a one year Hollywood sabbatical, I met a great teacher, writer, human being named Chuck Kinder who embraced me so warmly, it was one of the reasons I felt like staying. He gathered together people who loved words and storytelling and by his very nature, weeded out the pretentious and those of self-importance."

Interests

• fishing, cooking

• Sport & Clubs

  white-water rafting

Connections

Charles Kinder II married Diane Cecily Blackmer on March 22, 1975. His first marriage to Janet Weaver ended in divorce.

Father:

Charles Alfonso Kinder

Mother:

Eileen Reba Kinder

Wife:

Diane Cecily Blackmer

Sister:

Beth Kemper

Brother:

David Kinder

ex-wife:

Janet Weaver

Friend, classmate:

Raymond Clevie Carver Jr.

Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. was a United States short story writer and poet. Carver played a major role in reviving the American short story form in the 1980s, and he has been referred to as one of the "greatest modern short story writers" and as "the American Chekhov." Although he is often associated with Minimalism, Carver himself disliked the label, thinking it misrepresented the nature of his work. His later stories and the recently published Beginners, which features the original versions of the severely edited stories that appeared in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, demonstrate the true expansiveness and heart of his style. Though he may be best known for his eight books of short fiction, he also wrote essays, plays, a screenplay, reviews, introductions, and seven books of poetry. Many film have been adapted from his stories, including Jindabyne, directed by Ray Lawrence, and Short Cuts, based on nine Carver short stories and for which director Robert Altman was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice International Film Festival and an Independent Spirit Award for Best Director.

Both Charles Kinder II and Raymond Carver were students in writing classes at Stanford when they met. At first, Kinder shied away from Carver because he "dressed like a big goofy guy, like some kind of nerd," as Kinder told. His relationship with Carver inspired the book Honeymooners.

Friend, classmate:

Scott Turow

Student:

Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Summerland (a novel for children), The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and Gentlemen of the Road, as well as the short story collections A Model World and Werewolves in Their Youth and the essay collections Maps and Legends and Manhood for Amateurs. Charles Kinder's II struggle to complete the book Honeymooners inspired the character, Grady Tripp, in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys. Chabon has also written a number of screenplays, including John Carter, and teleplays.

Michael Chabon has lectured widely on topics including the art and craft of writing, the tradition of Jewish fiction, and Vladimir Nabokov, to name but a very few. He has appeared before audiences all over the United States and in Russia, Finland, Lithuania, Italy, France, Great Britain, Germany, and Canada. He has spoken to the creative teams at Pixar Animation Studios about fantasy and childhood, to the employees of Industrial Light and Magic about the art of storytelling, and to many different literary, Jewish, and corporate organizations about a wide variety of topics. In March 2012, he was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is also the recipient of the 2020 St. Louis Literary Award. Michael Chabon was the chairman of the board of directors at the MacDowell Colony in 2010-2020.