Vance Bourjaily

Vance Bourjaily (1922–2010) was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, a Lebanese immigrant, was a journalist, and his mother wrote romance novels. Raised in New York and Virginia, Bourjaily interrupted his studies at Bowdoin College to serve in the Second World War, first as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service and later as an army infantryman in occupied Japan. Legendary editor Maxwell Perkins commissioned Bourjaily’s debut novel, The End of My Life, while he was still in the army, and the book is widely considered to be one of the finest accounts of World War II in American literature. Bourjaily’s many other acclaimed works include The Violated, Confessions of a Spent Youth, and Brill Among the Ruins, a nominee for the National Book Award. A longtime teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Arizona, Bourjaily was the first director of the master of fine arts program in creative writing at Louisiana State University.