Clarence Major

Biography Clarence Major was born on December 31, 1936, in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in Chicago.

Major is distinguished professor emeritus of 20th-Century American Literature at the University of California, Davis. His literary archives are in the Givens Collection of African American Literature, Anderson Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Minnesota.

Teaching Major has taught literature and/or creative writing at Brooklyn College, New York University, Queens College, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Washington, Howard University, University of Maryland, University of Colorado, Temple University, Binghamton University, the University of California at Davis and on a Fulbright-Hays Exchange award he taught American culture at the University of Nice, in France, 1981–1983. He left the University of Colorado in 1989 and he taught at the University of California, Davis, for 18 years before his retirement in 2007.

Recognition Major won a National Council on the Arts Award for his poetry collection Swallow the Lake in 1970, and the following year was awarded a New York Cultural Foundation grant for poetry. Reflexe et Ossature (1982), the French translation of Reflex and Bone Structure (1975), was nominated for the Prix Maurice Coindreau (1982). Such Was The Season (1987) was a Literary Guild book club selection in 1988. The same year, The New York Times Book Review recommended it on its annual "Summer Reading" list. Painted Turtle: Woman With Guitar (1988) was cited by The New York Times Book Review as a "Notable Book of The Year" 1988. In 1990, his short-story collection, Fun & Games, was nominated for the Los Angeles Book Critics Award.

Major won a Bronze Medal as a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999 for Configurations: New and Selected Poems 1958–1998 (Copper Canyon Press). He won the Pushcart Prize for the short story "My Mother and Mitch", in 1989.

Anthologies In a 1989 review for The New York Times, Major stated: "At best, as with magazines, literary anthologies can keep the reader in touch with the esthetic temperament of the time." He has edited several anthologies, most recently Calling the Wind: 20th Century African-American Short Stories (1993) and The Garden Thrives: 20th Century African-American Poetry (1996). His own work has appeared in The Norton Anthology of American Literature and The Pushcart Prize: The Best of The Small Presses, among others.

Periodicals Major's fiction, poetry, nonfiction and book reviews have appeared in periodicals, including The New Yorker, Harvard Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The Literary Review.

Visual arts

Major studied drawing and painting under the direction of painter Gus Nall (1919–1995) from 1952 to 1954. Major also attended sketch and lecture classes during the same period in Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Education Major has attended or received degrees from the following institutions: A Art Institute of Chicago (James Nelson Raymond scholar), 1952–54. Black Slang: A Dictionary of Afro-American Talk, London: Routledge (1971), The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work, Okpaku Communications Corp (1974), Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (1994), Necessary Distance: Essays and Criticism (2000), Come by Here: My Mother's Life, Wiley (2002), Configurations Paintings by Clarence Major (2010), limited edition exhibition catalogue Myself Painting Paintings by Clarence Major (2011), limited edition exhibition catalogue Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African-American Postmodernist, ed. Bernard W. Bell (2001), The Paintings and Drawings of Clarence Major (2019),

Anthology appearances The New Black Poetry (1969), Calling the Wind: 20th Century African-American Short Stories, HarperCollins (1993), The Garden Thrives: 20th Century African-American Poetry, HarperCollins (1996), The Essential Clarence Major: Prose and Poetry, University of North Carolina Press (2020),