Robert Lacy

Robert Lacy (born 1930s) is an American writer whose short stories and essays have been published in a large number of publications including The Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Gettysburg Review. He has also published several books of fiction and essays.

Life

Lacy was born and raised in east Texas, and served in the United States Marines Corps from 1955 to 1959. He received his Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Texas, Austin (1962) before enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he was a student of Richard Yates. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1966. He taught Creative Writing in the Department of English, University of Oregon (1966–1969) and in the Department of English, Slippery Rock College (1969–1972). He left academia for journalism and briefly became a reporter and copyeditor for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He was appointed Research Analyst and then Assistant Director of the Office of Senate Research in the Minnesota Senate (1973–1983). He resumed a journalistic career when he became a columnist and reviewer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, 1987-1998 and also resumed a teaching career when he was an Adjunct Faculty Member in the Program of Creative and Professional Writing, University of Minnesota, 1990-1995. He also served as a faculty member of the Loft Literary Center from 1989 to 2003. The Best of Crazyhorse: Thirty Years of Poetry and Fiction, A Ghost at Heart's Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption, and The Next Parish Over: A Collection of Irish American Writing.

His fiction was first collected in book form in The Natural Father: Stories, released in 1997 by New Rivers Press. Since then two subsequent collections of his fiction have been released, I Remember Highway 80: Stories and Happy Birthday, Dear Darrell and Other Stories, released in 2017 and 2019 respectively by Stephen F. Austin State University Press.

In 2021, Stephen F. Austin State University Press released The House on Brown Street, a collection of his essays. Among Lacy's notable essays is "Icarus," published in the fall 2003 issue of North Dakota Quarterly and focusing on Arnold Samuelson, who in 1934 hitchhiked from Minneapolis to Key West to meet Ernest Hemingway and later wrote a book about the author. The essay follows Samuelson's life after he spent a year with Hemingway, with Lacy comparing Samuelson to Icarus, who flew too close to the sun.

Reviews William Kittredge said that "Robert Lacy's stories are direct, honest, grace-filled, and useful. We see ourselves in the mirror of their transactions, and we are moved to forgive and love one another. The Natural Father is that good thing, a book that both sweetens and illuminates our lives."