Background
Loree Rackstraw was born Lora Lee Pugh on June 27, 1931 in Omaha, Nebraska.
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Loree Rackstraw
Edit ProfileEducation
She received an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Grinnell College in 1953, and an Master of Fine Arts in English at the University of Iowa.
Career
She taught English at the University of Northern Iowa from 1966–1996, and she is the author of Love As Always, Kurt: Vonnegut As I Knew Him (2009). In 1966, Rackstraw began a thirty-year career in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Northern Iowa, where she taught courses in fiction writing, literature, mythology and humanities. After their time together in Iowa City, Vonnegut and Rackstraw remained frequent correspondents and often visited one another.
Rackstraw also regularly reviewed Vonnegut’s work in her official capacity at the North American Review and published a number of academic articles on his work in books and journals including Kurt Vonnegut: Images and Representations (2000) and The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays (1996).
Jerome Klinkowitz finds that this relationship had a significant impact on the work of both Rackstraw and Vonnegut: “lieutenant had to have been the impression Kurt’s work made that prompted Loree’s investigations of feminist thought. And because she was thinking this way and was in frequent contact with Kurt by mail and phone similar trends in his own fiction developed.
Would he have written Galápagos without her? I’m sure there’d be no Circe Berman in Bluebeard without Loree, and perhaps no Bluebeard at all.” Rackstraw appears in chapter 62 of Kurt Vonnegut"s semi-autobiographical novel, Timequake, at a clambake held in honor of Vonnegut"s recurring character, Kilgore Trout. Loree Rackstraw’s papers have been held since 1996 in the University of Northern Iowa Special Collections and University Archives.
Membership
She also served as a fiction editor and reviewer for the North American Review and was a long-time member of the College Hill Neighborhood Association in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
