John Casey

John Dudley Casey (January 18, 1939 – February 22, 2025) was an American novelist and translator. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1989 for Spartina. His father was Joseph E. Casey, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives. and his classmates included John Irving and Gail Godwin. While at Iowa, he sold three short stories to The New Yorker. Among others, writer Breece D'J Pancake studied under him.

Casey's papers reside at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

Family Casey's brother-in-law is Nobel Prize-winning physician Harold E. Varmus.

Casey had two adult daughters from his first marriage to novelist Jane Barnes: Nell Casey and Maud Casey. Maud is a published author in her own right, with two well-reviewed novels and a collection of short stories to her credit. Nell Casey is the editor of the essay collection Unholy Ghost on depression and creativity, including essays by herself and her sister, and editor of a second essay collection, An Uncertain Inheritance, by contributors caring for family through illness and death.

He also had two daughters, Clare and Julia, from his second marriage to artist and calligrapher Rosamond Casey, whom he married in 1982.

Casey was the uncle of journalist and writer Alex Kuczynski, whose parents are his sister Jane and his former brother-in-law Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who was President of Peru from 2016 to 2018.

Title IX complaints In November 2017, Casey was accused of sexually harassing Emma C. Eisenberg, a graduate of the University of Virginia's M.F.A. program. A second anonymous M.F.A. student filed an additional Title IX complaint at the same time. On November 30, 2017, the university's Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights announced that Casey would not be teaching during the spring 2018 semester, nor would he be advising or mentoring students.

In December 2018, a UVA investigation found sufficient evidence that Casey kissed and inappropriately touched a female undergraduate student in 2001. The investigator also found that, "nearly 30 years ago" (approximately 1989), Casey made a sexual advance toward one of his female graduate students. Among the supported allegations, Casey used the word "cunt" while teaching, called a student a "sexy Irish pirate", commented regularly on female students' appearances, and showed up uninvited to a female student's house and "was overly critical and hostile to her when she rebuffed him". 1991 Rome Prize 1993 "Mildred and Harold Strauss Living" Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Works

Fiction An American Romance, Atheneum (1977) Testimony and Demeanor, Knopf (1979) Spartina, Knopf (1989) Supper at the Black Pearl, Lord John Press (1996) The Half-Life of Happiness, Knopf (1998) Compass Rose, Knopf, (2010)

Non-fiction Room For Improvement: Notes on a Dozen Lifelong Sports, Knopf (2011) Beyond the First Draft: The Art of Fiction, W. W. Norton & Company (2014)

Translations