Janet Burroway

Janet Burroway (born September 21, 1936) is an American author. Burroway's published oeuvre includes eight novels, memoirs, short stories, poems, translations, plays, two children's books, and two how-to books about the craft of writing. Her novel The Buzzards was nominated for the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. Raw Silk is her most acclaimed novel thus far. While Burroway's literary fame is due to her novels, the book that has won her the widest readership is Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, first published in 1982. Now in its 10th edition, the book is used as a textbook in writing programs throughout the United States.

Early life and education 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. Burroway's intelligence and gift for words resulted in one of her elementary school teachers tutoring her in poetry after class. 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.

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

Personal life

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. 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.

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. Often overlooked by critics because it was not published in the United States, the book is structured around the myth of Plato's “Cave.” 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. 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.”

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,

Her second children's book The Giant Jam Sandwich with illustrations by John Vernon Lord was first published in 1972 and had enduring popularity. 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. She came back to America with her sons after landing a position at the University of Illinois.

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. For a while, his suicide was all she could write about. Writing about Tim helped her cope with her grief.

Eventually, she returned to the subject matter of Paper.

Known for her complex female protagonists, Burroway 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. 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.”

Awards and recognition In 2014, she was named as the recipient of the Florida Humanities Council's 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing. Long Time No See, produced at Bloomington Playwrights’ Theatre, Bloomington, Indiana, July 31 – Aug.2, 2008. Winn Dixie, film adaptation by Ana Silverlinck, USC Film School, 2008. Morality Play, musical, adapted from the novel by Barry Unsworth, with composer Matthew M. Kiedrowski, concert reading (Midwest New Musicals, Light Opera Works and NEA), Athenaeum Theatre, Chicago, Feb. 2012; third prize winner, New Musicals Incorporated (Los Angeles, CA) international new musicals search, 2015. Boomerang, commissioned by the Sideshow Theatre Company as part of their Freshness Initiative, Chicago, 2015.