Wirt Williams

Wirt Williams (August 21, 1921 – June 29, 1986) was an American novelist, journalist, and professor of English who was three times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, once for reporting and twice for his fiction.

Born on August 21, 1921 on the campus of the Goodman, Mississippi-based agricultural school headed by his father (which would later become Holmes Community College), Williams was raised in Cleveland, Mississippi. Williams took his undergraduate degree at Delta State University and in 1941, was awarded a master's degree in journalism from Louisiana State University.

Williams joined the Navy in 1942, and was commissioned an ensign in the Naval Reserve. He was stationed on the destroyer the USS Decatur that patrolled the North Atlantic seeking out and destroying German submarines. Subsequently, he was transferred to the Pacific Theater of Operations, where he was the captain of a Landing Ship (LSM) preparing for the proposed Operation Downfall.. He attained the rank of Lieutenant Commander.

Williams attained the rank of Lieutenant Commander. His first novel The Enemy (1951), was based on his combat experiences aboard the submarine destroyer.

After being demobilized, Williams became a reporter on the Shreveport Times and, subsequently, the New Orleans Item. For his reporting on the conditions inside a Louisiana insane asylum, he won a Heywood Brown Newspaper Guild Award and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Williams left journalism and earned a PhD in English from the University of Iowa, subsequently becoming a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. He wrote six novels, one of which, 1959's Ada Dallas was made in to the 1961 film Ada. His 1965 novel The Trojans, a roman a clef about the movie industry loosely based on the life of Marilyn Monroe and the debacle of the 1963 movie Cleopatra, became a best seller, selling over a million copies.

Both Ada Dallas and The Far Side, his 1972 roman à clef novel loosely based on the early career of novelist James Jones were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other novels were Love in a Windy Space (1956) and A Passage of Hawks (1963).

Heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway as a writer, Williams published The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway in 1982.

Shortly after retiring as a professor, Wirt Williams died of a stroke on June 29, 1986. He was 64 years old.

• The Enemy (1951)
• Love in a Windy Space (1956)
• Ada Dallas (1959)
• A Passage of Hawks (1963)
• The Trojans (1965)
• The Far Side (1972)
• The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway (1982)