Will Blythe

Will Blythe is a magazine writer and book author living in New York City. He is the editor of Byliner.com, a former literary editor at Esquire magazine, and a contributing editor for Harper's and Mirabella. He writes for many other periodicals, including The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Elle, and the Oxford American.

Early life and education Blythe was born in 1957 in North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Career His short story "The Taming Power of the Small" was anthologized in the Best American Short Stories for 1988 and adapted into a 1995 short film starring David Morse and Treat Williams. Blythe's 2006 book, To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever, follows the author through a season rooting for his beloved University of North Carolina Tar Heels basketball team and examining his hatred of the school's rival, Duke University (see Carolina-Duke rivalry). The New York Times describes Blythe thus: "... he writes amusingly, self-deprecatingly and often beautifully. {...} Fans of college basketball will wish that all sportswriters possessed Blythe's ability to describe a game, to translate its tension and render its action." Blythe is also the editor of Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, published in 1999, and co-editor of Lust, Violence, Sin, Magic: Sixty Years of Esquire Fiction, published in 1993. He writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review.