Robert Clark Young

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Robert Clark Young (born 1960) is an American author of novels, essays, and short stories. Recurring themes in Young's work include the relation between alcoholism, the abuse of power, and institutional dysfunction in American life, within contemporary and historical contexts. Young has been involved in several controversies about both the fiction and journalistic articles he has written.

Contents 1 Young's life 2 Controversy over One of the Guys 3 The Neilson/Kingsolver and Wind Done Gone Controversies 4 Conflict with Brad Vice and Sewanee Writers' Conference 5 Young's other writings 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Young's life

Born in Hollywood, California, Young was raised in Los Angeles and San Diego and won fellowships to study writing at the University of San Diego; the University of California, Davis, where he studied with Beat Generation author Gary Snyder; and the University of Houston, in the doctoral Creative Writing Program founded by postmodern satirist Donald Barthelme. The Creative Writing Program at UC-Davis awards a Master's degree that is equivalent to an M.F.A.^[1] Young's first teaching job, when he was 25, was as a civilian working on U.S. Navy ships deployed throughout the Far East. This experience would form the basis for his first novel, One of the Guys, published by HarperCollins in 1999.

When not writing, Young has been active in the anti-war movement and was arrested twice in 2003 for nonviolent protest of the Iraq War.

[edit] Controversy over One of the Guys

One of the Guys is a satire about a man impersonating a U.S. Navy chaplain on a ship that suffers a series of comic misadventures in the Far East. The novel gained notoriety shortly after publication when the American Family Association objected to Young's portrayal of a man posing as a Christian chaplain during deployment to ports where an alcoholic crew avails itself of child prostitution. The AFA, which had previously used the work of artists to attack the funding practices of the National Endowment for the Arts, lobbied the U.S. Congress to have the agency defunded.

Young responded, in The Washington Post and elsewhere, that the controversial sections of One of the Guys were not pornographic, but had been written to expose what he saw as the U.S. Navy's complicity in child prostitution overseas. He perceived an inconsistency in the AFA objecting to taxpayer funding of a book that exposed and criticized sexual exploitation, when the AFA should have been objecting to taxpayer funding of the exploitation itself.

One of the Guys was subsequently nominated for the PEN/Newman's Own Award, which recognizes authors who have stood up to censorship in the United States.

[edit] The Neilson/Kingsolver and Wind Done Gone Controversies

In May, 2001 Young published an article in the San Francisco Chronicle that accused novelist Melany Neilson of plagiarizing, in The Persia Cafe, significant portions of verbatim text from the novel The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. Young criticized Neilson's publisher, St. Martin's Press, for refusing to pull copies of The Persia Cafe from stores. Young placed his argument within the context of the concurrent litigation between Alice Randall and the estate of Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind. He argued that Randall's book, The Wind Done Gone, was not in fact an instance of plagiarism, because Randall's intent was humorous and parodic, and therefore deserving of First Amendment protection, while Neilson's borrowing from Kingsolver involved verbatim text without parodic intent, thus Neilson's borrowing was not protected.^[2] Randall's attorneys cited Young's opinion piece among the evidence in favor of Randall, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated an injunction against publishing the book in Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin .

[edit] Conflict with Brad Vice and Sewanee Writers' Conference

Young also wrote a much-publicized article in the New York Press about Brad Vice, a short-story writer whose first collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, won the 2005 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press. Vice's collection was later pulled from the shelves and destroyed by his publisher, based on an allegation of plagiarism.^[3] Young's article summarized the plagiarism case against Vice while also claiming to discover an additional plagiarism charge against Vice. Young was the first to discover and report that Vice's "Tuscaloosa Knights" story appears not only in the pulped book, but also in Vice's 2001 University of Cincinnati dissertation draft of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train.^[4]

Young's article stimulated a great deal of Internet discussion and was cited by a number of blogs and a newspaper in Japan.^[5] However, others quickly argued that Young's article and the evidence for his claims had serious flaws, including the failure by Young to quote accurately from Vice's dissertation (such that this made the case for plagiarism in the second instance appear stronger than it was), the failure to mention supporting evidence from the dissertation, and the failure to disclose a conflict of interest in writing the article.^[6] As a result of this, some commentators questioned the article's findings.^[7]

The Atlantic Monthly's C. Michael Curtis, who edited and published the short story which Young said proved an additional case of plagiarism, later said he

"...decided to postpone (the story's) publication until we had worked with Vice to prevent easily-avoided overlap in some particular details. The story of Bear Bryant’s first A&M football team seemed to us well-known and not the property of (the author of Vice's source material) or anyone else. Further, the heart of the story we believed, then and now, to be the invention of Brad Vice, even though elements of its drama is placed in the familiar setting." ^[8]

Young's article also featured a lengthy attack on the Sewanee Writers' Conference and Barry Hannah. Vice's supporters mentioned that Young had previously had a run in with Hannah and Vice at the Sewanee Conference and suggested that his article about Vice was an attempt at revenge.^[9] In response to this, some of Young's supporters said that a smear campaign was being conducted against Young by Vice's advocates.^[10]

[edit] Young's other writings

Young continued to write and publish in the wake of the One of the Guys controversy. He began work on a multi-volume historical novel based on the half-century of conflict between the alcoholic pro-German newspaper publisher Cissy Patterson and her daughter, the Countess Felicia Gizycka, who was one of the founding female members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Young's essay One Writer’s Big Innings, a comic look at the struggles of a young writer, was reprinted in AWP Chronicle, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and won the Black Warrior Review’s Best of the 1990s Nonfiction Award in 2002.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Collier, Gene, NEA Foes Miss Boat on Satire, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, October 25, 2000
• Garvin, Cosmo Moral Minority, Sacramento News and Review, March 1, 2001
• Hansen, Suzy, Our Wolves in Uniform Salon.com, March 22, 2001
• McInerney, Tom, NEA Funding up Despite Criticism Poets and Writers Magazine, January 2001
• Quinn, Brad, In the Navy Cincinnati CityBeat, November 16, 2000
• Sherwin, Elisabeth, First Amendment Sweethearts, Bob and Isabel, Davis Enterprise, October 15, 2000
• Sherwin, Elisabeth, Meet Countess Felicia, The Richest Girl in the World, Davis Enterprise, August 1, 2005
• Young, Robert Clark, A Strange 'Family Values' Attack on the NEA Washington Post, December 15, 2000
• Young, Robert Clark, Mimi and Cecilia: A Recollection Santa Monica Review, Spring, 2003
• Young, Robert Clark, One Writer’s Big Innings Black Warrior Review, Fall, 1992.