Janet Burroway

Burroway was born in Tucson, Arizona. The second child and only daughter of tool and die worker Paul Burroway and his wife Alma (née Milner). Janet Burroway was educated in Phoenix.[4] Burroway's intelligence and gift for words resulted in one of her elementary school teachers tutoring her in poetry after class.[5] She was educated at the University of Arizona, Barnard College of Columbia University, Cambridge University, and the Yale School of Drama.

Her first scholarships were courtesy of local men's clubs, the Elks and the Knights of Pythias, and allowed her to attend the University of Arizona. After studying there for a year (1954–55), Burroway won the Mademoiselle Magazine College Board Contest and spent part of the summer of 1955 in New York City as the magazine's Guest Editor.[3]

Burroway's first poem to be published in a national magazine was “The Rivals,” which appeared in Seventeen when Burroway herself was eighteen (June 1954). In 1955, her first play, Garden Party, was produced at Barnard College. Seventeen also published Burroway's first short story, “I Do Not Love You, Wesley,” in January 1957. In August of that same year, The Atlantic published Burroway's poem “Song.”[6]

After receiving her M. A. from Cambridge, Burroway taught at the University of Sussex from 1965 to 1970.

Burroway married Belgian theatre director Walter Eysselinck and lived in Belgium for two years where she worked as a costume designer. The couple's oldest son, Timothy Alan Eysselinck, was born in Ghent in 1964 and committed suicide in Windhoek, April 21, 2004.[7] After Eysselinck took a theatre job in Sussex, the family moved to England, where Burroway had their second child in 1966. She left Eysselinck in 1971.[8]

She married William Dean Humphries, an artist, in 1978, but the marriage did not last. The two divorced in 1981.

In 1993, Burroway married her long-time partner, Utopian scholar Peter Ruppert.[8] The two spend their time in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin[4] and Chicago.

While in England, Burroway finished her first novel, Descend Again.[9] Often overlooked by critics because it was not published in the United States,[10] the book is structured around the myth of Plato's “Cave.”[11] In 1961, Burroway's first book of poetry, But to the Season, was published by Keele University Press. Burroway spent 1960–1961 in New Haven, Connecticut after receiving an RCA/NBC scholarship in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama.[11]

Her fourth novel, The Buzzards, came out in 1969. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.[12] Critic Elisabeth Muhlenfeld said, “The Buzzards is a political novel of unusual artistry. Its controlling metaphor is adopted from the first chorus of the Oresteia . . . . [when] warrior-birds swoop upon a pregnant hare, tearing out the unborn brood.”[13]

That same year the first of Burroway's two children's books, The Truck on the Track, came out in England. The American edition was published the following year by Bobbs-Merrill. The book enjoyed a long print run,[14]

Her second children's book The Giant Jam Sandwich with illustrations by John Vernon Lord was first published in 1972 and had enduring popularity.[15] In 2008, composer Philip Wharton set it to music for narrator and orchestra, and the piece had its debut performance with the Iowa City Symphony.

Burroway completed her fourth play, Hoddinott Veiling, in 1970; it was performed that year by ATV Network Television in London. Another play, The Fantasy Level, was first produced in 1961 at the Yale School of Drama, and again in 1968 by the Gardner Center for the Arts for the Brighton Festival in Sussex. The Beauty Operators was also produced by the Gardner Center for the Arts, then by the Armchair Theatre, Thames Television in London in 1970.[6]

In 1971, her marriage had finally collapsed.[16] She came back to America with her sons after landing a position at the University of Illinois.[3] Depressed and distraught, Burroway contemplated suicide.[17]

In 1972, Burroway accepted a position as Associate Professor of English Literature and Writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Except for brief stints at other institutions as a visiting professor, Burroway taught at Florida State University until her retirement in 2002.[8]

Burroway received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1976, which was followed by two resident fellowships at Yaddo (in Saratoga Springs, New York), one in 1985 and again in 1987.[6]

Burroway's fifth novel, Raw Silk took seven years to research and write, but it was responsible for introducing her to a wide popular audience. The book was also important for her personally, since she had incorporated chunks of her own life into it, a practice she had tentatively begun in The Buzzards. Burroway wrote about eighty pages in a two-day period, then revised the material down to nine pages that “worked perfectly well as narrative. And it forced me to see that if I was avoiding my real concerns and trying to write Great Literature, I would likely not be able to write.” [11] After that, Burroway looked over the books she had written and realized that the threads she consistently wove through her narrative and kept returning to—in particular, mentor relationships, the abandonment of children, race, and suicide—were in fact themes. “That’s why I began Raw Silk with, ‘This morning I abandoned my only child.’” [11]

Another book of poetry, Material Goods, was published in 1980 by the University Presses of Florida. In 1982, the first edition of Burroway’s “how-to” book, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, was published. Burroway wrote two more novels, Opening Nights (Antheum, 1985), which draws on her background in theatre, and Cutting Stone, set, like her first novel, in a small Arizona town of another era. Cutting Stone became a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, and in 1993-94 Burroway was awarded the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fellowship. A collection of essays-as-memoir, Embalming Mom, came out in 2002. By 2004, Burroway was working on another novel, Paper, which dealt with the love affair between a white woman and a black mill worker.[11]

In 2004, Burroway's eldest son committed suicide.[18] For a while, his suicide was all she could write about. Writing about Tim, helped her cope with her grief.[3][19]

Eventually, she returned to the subject matter of Paper.[9] Re-conceived and re-christened Bridge of Sand, the novel explores what happens when a white woman falls in love with a black man in the contemporary American South.[20][21]

Burroway's work has been greeted with approval, enthusiasm, and, on occasion, rave reviews. Critic Elisabeth Muhlenfeld has called her “a writer of wide range and many voices” who has “consciously avoided current trends.” [22] Author Joan Fry referred to her as “a writer’s writer, a prodigiously talented all-American girl.” Critic Thomas Rankin observed that Burroway's fiction is known for “its stylistic excellence and tragicomic tone, portraying evil as the result of emotional blindness.” He also notes that Burroway “has been called a Renaissance woman for her achievements as a novelist, teacher, playwright, [poet], columnist, and critic,” but that her most important achievement “may be the encouragement and role modeling she provides for young women who aspire to write.”[23]

Known for her complex female protagonists, Burroway enjoys experimenting with technique; she is adept at assuming the speech and thought patterns of characters of another gender, race, or age. The authors she most admires (and continues to reread) are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James.[20]

In 2014, she was named as the recipient of the Florida Humanities Council's 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing.[2][18]

• Janet Burroway on Losing Tim at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library
• Janet Burroway at the Florida Humanities Council
• Appearances on C-SPAN