Franz Douskey

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Franz Douskey

Occupation Novelist and Writer

Franz Douskey is an American writer. Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, his work was published in nearly two hundred publications.

Douskey has lived in Memphis, New Orleans, Tucson, and the West Indies. William Packard, editor of the New York Quarterly, listed Franz Douskey as a contemporary influential writer [1] along with James Dickey, Robert Penn Warren, with whom Douskey traveled from time to time (Read "Remembering James Dickey" in the New York Quarterly 61).

Douskey's version of the story of Chief Joseph was published in 1980 (in the Inland Boat Series), a few years before Robert Penn Warren's Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce was published (1983). While living in Memphis, Douskey became friends with Sam C. Phillips, the founder of Sun Records, who became an early mentor. He traveled extensively in the 1960s before settling in Tucson. It was there that he met poet Richard Shelton, Edward Abbey, William Eastlake, Raymond Carver, and Charles Bukowski.

Douskey and Bukowski carried on what has been described as a long, antagonistic relationship, which was refereed by William Packard, who published both Bukowski and Douskey in many issues of the New York Quarterly.

In Tucson, in the Sixties, Douskey ran a "resistance-house" for draftees heading for Canada, set up the Free University with Steve Mueller, and helped establish the Food Conspiracy, before then moving east to work with the Black Panther Party. Because of Douskey's political activities and his nickname, "Duke", several Edward Abbey followers concluded that Douskey was Abbey's model for George Washington Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Douskey lived in Cornish, New Hampshire, near the equally reclusive J. D. Salinger. When Douskey would run into tourists anxious to ferret out Salinger, he would misdirect the intruders down a series of dirt roads that led them away from Salinger's house into nearby towns.

In his works, Douskey originated numerous neologisms, including "factitious": the complex piling on of erroneous facts based on a false premise (as in "We must go to war because there are weapons of mass destruction"); "fictoid": a brief lie hoping to pass as the truth (as in "I never had sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky") the comically ponderous "irregardful", which is grammatically correct; and the astute observation that "Sequels never equal" (pg. 64 in The New Official Rules, edited by Paul Dickson). He also contributed to the Howard Stern Show (WNBC), and to Emeril Live! on the Food Network.

Franz Douskey has read from his works at hundreds of venues, including the University of Georgia, the Donnell Library (with F. D. Reeve), the Cronkite Graduate Center at Harvard, Yale University, Goddard College, New York University, in Albany, University of Arizona, and the New School of Social Research, among others. Recordings of early readings with Allen Ginsberg, who was a long time friend and correspondent, are archived in the Ginsberg-Stanford University collection.

In recent years, Douskey has published very little. He taught Creative Writing at Yale University for five summers, until 2001. In 2006, Douskey served as president of IMPAC University, in Punta Gorda, Florida. He also produced and co-hosted a weekly radio-show on WQUN, at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, where he is rumored to currently reside.

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