Tom Franklin

Background

Tom Franklin was born on July 6, 1963, in Dickinson, Alabama, United States. He was born in the hamlet of Dickinson, Alabama, which has a population of around 400 and is about half-white, half-black.

Education

In 1981 Tom Franklin moved with his family to Mobile, Alabama, and later attended the University of South Alabama in Mobile where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in English. After graduating from the University of South Alabama, Tom Franklin earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction at the University of Arkansas in 1998. He is the first member of his family to finish college.

Career

When Franklin went to the University of South Alabama, he got such bad grades that his father told him he wasn't going to pay anymore. While attending the University of South Alabama, Tom Franklin worked nights at various places. He was employed as a heavy equipment operator at a sandblasting grit factory, a construction inspector in a chemical plant, a clerk at a hospital morgue, and he also worked at hazardous waste clean-up sites.

In 1999 Tom Franklin returned to the University of South Alabama to teach. In the fall of the same year, he became the Phillip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Next, he moved to Knox College, where he held the position of Visiting Writer-in-Residence. In 2000, Tom Franklin moved to Oxford, Mississippi, as the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss. While there, he instructed both undergraduate and graduate students in a two-semester fiction writing course. He and his wife Beth Ann Fennelly maintain a house in Oxford where she is a member of the English Department. Winner of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, Franklin taught at Sewannee during the academic year 2002-2003. Tom Franklin continues to teach as Associate Professor of Fiction Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

As a writer, Tom Franklin has found great success. His short stories and essays have been published in numerous magazines including The Chattahoochee Review, Brightleaf, The Nebraska Review, The Texas Review, Quarterly West, and Smoke Magazine, to name a few. His writings have also been included in anthologies such as New Stories from the South; The Year’s Best, 1999; Best American Mystery Stories, 1999 and 2000; and Best Mystery Stories of the Century.

Among the ten stories collected in Tom Franklin’s "Poachers" is a tale of a factory manager involved in an extortion racket, an exploration of small-town men’s reactions to unfaithful marriages, and a story centering on the men at a bachelor party. The collection contains fiction that is “honestly and carefully executed” and “unflinchingly explores the pitfalls and dangers involved in making one’s place in the world.” indicated a Publishers Weekly critic. The volume addresses stereotypically defined male interests and is presented from a male perspective. Poverty, small-town life, and desperation are common elements in Poachers. “Knee-deep in the muddy woods of Alabama. Franklin’s unhappy men live at the extreme edge.” described James Klise in a Booklist assessment. Perhaps the most remarkable piece in the collection is the title story, a novella telling of three brothers, orphaned when their father commits suicide, who survive by poaching and, in defense of their livelihood, commit murder. As Klise commented: “The title novella skillfully evokes the impoverished community of its doomed main characters, three teenage brothers, hunted by a legendary poacher-lumed-game warden.”

Achievements

• Franklin’s work has been recognized with literary awards including a Guggenheim fellowship, Philip Roth Residency in Creative Writing, and the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Fiction. Franklin’s books have won an Edgar Award, appeared in Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, and won a Los Angeles Times’ Book Prize (mystery/thriller). "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter" (2010) was nominated for nine awards and won five, including the Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Tilted World

    (Set against the backdrop of the historic flooding of the ...)

    2013
  • Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

    ("Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter," tells the riveting stor...)

    2010
  • Poachers: Stories - Kindle edition by Tom Franklin

    (In ten stunning and bleak tales set in the woodlands, swa...)

    2009
  • Mississippi Noir

    (Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of orig...)

    2016
  • Hell at the Breech

    (In 1897, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered ...)

    2009
  • Smonk

    (It's 1911 and the townsfolk of Old Texas, Alabama, have h...)

    2009

Religion

Franklin attended Dickinson Baptist Church for a while.

Politics

Tom Franklin said: "I do still think racism is everywhere, and I wish our president [Barack Obama] had been able to do more. I voted for him and will again and am proud we elected an African American as president, but I suppose I thought life would be drastically altered, and it wasn’t. Isn’t."

Views

Quotations: “Maybe Larry was wrong about the word friend, maybe he'd been shoved away from everybody for so long all he was was a sponge for the wrongs other people did.”

“Was that what childhood was? Things rushing by out a window, the trees connected by motion, going too fast for him to notice the consequences?”

"No real person is a stereotype, and I try to make my characters as real as I can. We're all a mess of contradictions and secrets, strangenesses and desires, and nobody's all good or all bad. We're all somewhere in the spectrum between absolute good and absolute evil. So I just try to find a character who's fairly normal, and put him or her in a fix and see how he or she negotiates it to see, as Kurt Vonnegut says, what he or she is made of. In this case, the story as I came to understand it called for Larry to stay home and Silas to leave. If it had been the other way around, I'd still work to make the characters unstereotypical."

"I think growing up in the south made me the person I am, and the writer I am comes from that. So, yes, the south's made me the writer I am. It taught me to listen to the cadences and rhythms of speech and to notice the landscape. It also has this defeated feel, a lingering of old sin, that makes it sweet in a rotting kind of way. Much of it is poor, much is rural, and that's an interesting combination, a deep well for stories."

"I always knew I wanted to tell stories, one way or another. If I'd had a video camera in the mid-1970s I'm sure I'd be a filmmaker now. But I just had a portable typewriter, and so the stories I could tell were ones on paper."

“The seat belt irked his father more than Uncle Colin's not eating meat, because, though his father never said it, Larry knew he considered seat belts cowardly.”

Personality

Franklin reveals the role imagination played during his younger years as he grew up "playing with G. I. Joes and imagining their lives. Building sci-fi forts from cardboard boxes and bricks, drawing control panels on the walls, etc. I liked creating the forts more than I did playing in them. There was something wonderful about making something tangible, something others could see, participate in. Then I moved to drawing my own comic books. I loved comic books - Marvel, DC. I collected them and had a couple of thousand of them. I drew one sci-fi comic book (a rip-off of Space 1999 and BattleStar Galactica) that numbered up to like 24 or 25. I was serious about it. Then I started writing barbarian stories. I loved Tarzan and Conan the Barbarian and so wrote a lot of bad imitations of those." Franklin was a marginal student; for example, in high school, he characterized himself as a "C student. Instead of reading Romeo and Juliet, I was reading Stephen King. I hated math, and failed algebra twice."

He grew up a nonhunter in a hunting household, and as a child he liked writing, drawing, and reading.

Among his favorite movies are "Dumb and Dumber," "Never Die: The Mad Genius of Barry Hannah," "Mile 22," "The Godfather."

His favorite TV-shows are "Lost," "Mad Men," "Family Guy," "Deadwood," "The Wire."

Quotes from others about the person

• The Publishers Weekly critic remarked: “While he may occasionally wax sentimental about life in the impoverished South, Franklin’s style is often... laconic and simply spoken.”

Interests

• Writers

  William Faulkner, William Shakespeare, Dennis Lehane, Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, Justin Cronin, Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, William Gay, Laura Lippman, Barry Bradford, Neal Thompson, Jennifer Egan, Jim Lynch, Anna Leahy, Adam Johnson, Michelle Richmond, Laura Dave, Urban Waite, David James Poissant

• Music & Bands

  Cary Hudson, Dent May, Caroline Herring, Leonard Cohen

Connections

Tom Franklin and his wife Beth Ann Fennelly have three children: Anna Claire, Thomas and Nolan. They live in Oxford, Mississippi, United States.

Spouse:

Beth Ann Fennelly

Daughter:

Anna Claire Franklin

Son:

Thomas Franklin

Son:

Nolan Franklin

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 194
  2010
• Tom Franklin | Facebook
• Tom Franklin - American Academy