Happy Birthday, Joy Williams

Born February 11, 1944, Chelmsford, MA

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates the eighty-first birthday of author, essayist, and educator Joy Williams. Known mostly her short fiction, she has also published novels and nonfiction works and is the recipient of many awards, including a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and a Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

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Joy Williams at the National Book Festival 2021, photographer unknown

“Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.”

Joy Williams at University of Arizona in 2022, photographer unknown

“The writer doesn’t want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He
doesn’t want to talk it into giving itself up.”

Ill Nature (2001) collects nineteen of Williams’ essays, a few of which were reprinted in various volumes of The Best American Essays. The Quick and the Dead (2000) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in fiction, and Harrow (2021) is Williams’s most recent published novel.

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First published essay:

• “I Led a Totally Unrequited Life,” New England Monthly, 1988.

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• The Florida Keys: A History and Guide, Penguin Random House, 2003.

• Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, Lyons Press, 2001.

Essays by Joy Williams reprinted (R) in The Best American Essays (BAE), or listed in Notables (N):

• “Literature Unnatured,” American Short Fiction, 2006 (BAE 2007, N).

• “One Acre,” Harper’s Magazine, 2001 (BAE 2002, N).

• “Cabin Cabin,” Joe, 1999 (BAE 2000, N).

• “The Inhumanity of the Animal People,” Harper’s Magazine, 1997 (BAE 1998, N).

• “The Case Against Babies,” Granta, 1996 (BAE 1997, R).

• “The Killing Game,” Esquire, 1990 (BAE 1991, R).

• “Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp,” Esquire, 1989 (BAE 1990, R).

• “I Led a Totally Unrequited Life,” New England Monthly, 1988 (BAE 1989, N).

See also:

Visit the Joy Williams Joy William collection at Washington University.

Watch Joy Williams discuss her novel Harrow at the National Book Festival, 2021.

Listen to this podcast from The New York Times on Joy Williams’s fiction, 2024.

Read “Joy Williams Remembers the Wildest Decades of Her Life” in Esquire, 2024.

Read “The Misanthropic Genius of Joy Williams,” by Dan Kois, The New York Times, 2015.

Read “Residence on Earth,” by Jonathan Dee, Harper’s Magazine, 2015.

Read this interview with Williams in The Paris Review, 2014.