R. A. Lafferty

Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (November 7, 1914 – March 18, 2002) was an American science fiction, fantasy and historical fiction writer best known for his imaginative and eccentric short stories and novels from the 1960s and 1970s. He was born the youngest of five siblings. One of the origins Lafferty has offered for his first name, Raphael, is that it was derived from the day on which he was expected to be born (October 24, the Feast of St. Raphael); he also speculates that he might have been named after the artist, or that he was named after St Raphael's Cathedral. When he was four, his family moved to Perry, Oklahoma. and came of age in the early years of the Great Depression. He studied in the night school division at the University of Tulsa in 1932–33, mostly studying mathematics and German, but left before graduating. In 1935, he began to work for Clark Electrical Supply Company in Tulsa and, from 1939 to 1942, attended the International Correspondence School, becoming what he described as a "correspondence school engineer". One of his hobbies was studying languages. He returned to his sales position at Clark and turned to writing in the late 1950s. He never married and lived most of his life in Tulsa with his sister, Anna Lafferty. In the same year, he also published The Reefs of Earth and Space Chantey, a science fiction retelling of Homer's Odyssey, which was then followed by Fourth Mansions, a work inspired by Teresa of Ávila. In 1994, he suffered another, more severe, stroke.

Lafferty's work was represented by Virginia Kidd Literary Agency, which held a cache of his unpublished manuscripts.

Death and legacy He died on March 18, 2002, aged 87 in a nursing home in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Lafferty's funeral took place at Christ the King Catholic Church in Tulsa, where he regularly attended daily Mass. He is buried at St. Rose Catholic Cemetery in Perry. A smaller collection, donated by Lafferty in 1979, is also housed in the University of Iowa Libraries' Special Collections department.

In March 2011, it was announced in Locus that the copyrights to 29 Lafferty novels and 225 short stories were up for sale. The literary estate was soon thereafter purchased by the magazine's nonprofit foundation, under the auspices of board member Neil Gaiman.

Writing style In his 2006 short story collection Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman includes a short story called "Sunbird" written in the style of Lafferty. In the introduction, he says this about Lafferty: There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma (he died in 2002), who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable -- you knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young I wrote to him, and he wrote back."Sunbird" was my attempt to write a Lafferty story, and it taught me a number of things, mostly how much harder they are than they look....

Gaiman and Lafferty had corresponded for several years during Gaiman's adolescence; he remembered Lafferty's letters as "filled with typical cock-eyed Lafferty humour and observations, wise and funny and sober all at once."

Per The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: He has fairly been described as a writer of tall tales, as a cartoonist, as an author whose tone was fundamentally oral; his conservative Catholicism has been seen as permeating every word he wrote (or has been ignored); he has been seen as a ransacker of old Mythologies, and as a flippant generator of new ones; he clearly delighted in a vision of the world as being irradiated by conspiracies both godly and devilish, but at times paid scant attention to the niceties of plotting; he has been understood by some as essentially light-hearted and by others as a solitary, stringent moralist; he was technically inventive, but lunged constantly into a slapdash sublime only skittishly evocative, and only occasionally, of anything like the traditional Sense of Wonder; his skill in the deploying of various rhetorical narrative voices was manifest, but these voices were sometimes choked in baroque flamboyance. ... He and Gene Wolfe have more than a shared faith in common. He has also been compared to the English writer G. K. Chesterton: " French publisher nervously asked whether Lafferty minded being compared to G. K. Chesterton (another Catholic author), and there was a terrifying silence that went on and on. Was the great man hideously offended? Eventually, very slowly, he said: 'You're on the right track, kid,' and wandered away."

Themes Lafferty's quirky prose

He received Nebula Award nominations for "In Our Block", "Slow Tuesday Night", Past Master, Fourth Mansions, "Continued on Next Rock", "Entire And Perfect Chrysolite", and The Devil is Dead. He never received a Nebula award. His 1992 collection Iron Tears was also a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.

The Oklahoma Department of Libraries granted him the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995.

Fourth Mansions was also named by David Pringle as one of his selections for Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels.