James Carlos Blake (born May 26, 1947) is an American writer of novels, novellas, short stories, and essays. His work has received extensive critical favor and several notable awards. He has been called “one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life” [1] as well as “one of the most original writers in America today and … certainly one of the bravest.” [2] He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.
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Blake has written about his boyhood in a memoir essay entitled “The Outsider” and has discussed his life and work in a profile in Texas Monthly and in a wide-ranging interview in Firsts. He was born in Tampico, Mexico, a third-generation Mexican descended from American, English, and Irish ancestors—including a British pirate who was executed in Veracruz, Mexico—and is a naturalized American citizen. His father, Carlos Sebastian Blake Hernandez, was a civil engineer. His mother, Estrella Maria Lozano Cano, was the daughter of a horse rancher and grew up on the family's ranch near Matamoros. Blake received his elementary education at St. Joseph’s Academy in Brownsville, Texas, and graduated from high school in Miami, Florida. After service in the U. S. Army airborne, he earned BA and MA degrees from the University of South Florida (Tampa) and an MFA degree from Bowling Green State University (Ohio), where he attended on a fellowship. He has worked as a snake-catcher, Volkswagen mechanic, swimming pool maintenance man, and county jail properties officer, but his primary occupation has been as a college instructor. He has taught at the University of South Florida, Bowling Green State University, Edison State College (Florida), the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (Saudi Arabia), and Miami Dade College. In 1997 he left teaching to write full-time. He was married and divorced three times before he was forty and has since remained single.
Although Blake wrote sporadically from his teens until his thirties, it was not until the early 1980s, while again living in Miami, that he began to write with purpose,[3] and over the next few years he published a number of short stories in a variety of literary journals. In 1995 he published his first novel, The Pistoleer, an account of the life and times of the infamous Texas outlaw, John Wesley Hardin. Structured as a sequence of first-person narratives—each of the dozens of chapters told by a different character—the novel was hailed as “an achievement by any standards, but as a first novel is simply astounding.” [4] It was a finalist for the 1995 Best Novel of the West award from the Western Writers of America. Despite its “western” setting, it was recognized as a significant literary work presenting not only the story of the title character, but also, through its vast array of narrators, a cultural mosaic of the South in the era of Reconstruction. The Pistoleer introduced several motifs that would recur in much of Blake’s subsequent work— violence as art; honor and morality as existential codes; and character as fate, a Heraclitean notion that Blake himself has cited as a pervasive theme in his fiction.[5]
In the ten years following the publication of The Pistoleer, Blake published eight more novels and a collection of short works, plus more short stories and two memoir essays. In 1997 his third novel, In the Rogue Blood, gained him considerable attention and won the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Dealing with the misadventures of a pair of American brothers during the time of the U.S. war with Mexico in the late 1840s, In the Rogue Blood is generally regarded as one of the most compelling works in recent American literature to treat violence as a primary engine of U.S. history. It has been widely compared to Cormac McCarthy’s savage masterpiece, Blood Meridian.[6]
While most of Blake’s short stories—and a novella, “Texas Woman Blues” — are set in more recent times, the chronological setting of all his novels to date is between the mid-19th-century and the latter 1930’s, and several of them feature historical figures as protagonists. In addition to Wes Hardin, his novels have centered on Pancho Villa, the Mexican bandit and revolutionary (The Friends of Pancho Villa); John Ashley, of the notorious Ashley criminal gang in early twentieth–century Florida (Red Grass River); “Bloody Bill” Anderson, the Missouri guerrilla captain of the American Civil War (Wildwood Boys); Harry Pierpont, the 1930s gangster and leader of a band of bank robbers that included John Dillinger (Handsome Harry); and Stanley Ketchel, the ragtime-era boxing champion who was murdered at age twenty-four (The Killings of Stanley Ketchel). Even in those of his novels whose protagonists are created of whole cloth (In the Rogue Blood, A World of Thieves, Under the Skin), real-life people play significant or cameo roles. For the past few years Blake has been rumored to be at work on a large-scale novel based on his family forebears.
Several of Blake's works have been published in foreign editions, and Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica has announced plans to direct Wild Roses, Tender Roses, a feature film based upon Blake's novel The Friends of Pancho Villa. The script is by Gordan Mihić. Filming is scheduled to start in Serbia and Spain in 2012.
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