Charles Newman (author)

Charles Newman
Born	May 27, 1938 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Died	March 15, 2006 (aged 68) St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Occupation	Writer, editor, teacher, dog breeder
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	North Shore Country Day School Yale University

Charles Hamilton Newman (May 27, 1938 - March 15, 2006) was an American writer, editor and dog breeder, best known for the novel White Jazz.

Charles Newman was born in St. Louis, Missouri, which his family had lived in since “it was a little village of French and Spanish inhabitants.” However, after World War Two his father, a furniture salesman, moved Newman and his mother to a suburban housing tract north of Chicago, next to a horseradish bottling plant. A renowned high school athlete, Newman attended North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, Illinois and led the school to championships in football, basketball and baseball.

At Yale University, Newman won the Bellamy Prize for best thesis in American history and dated author Carol Brightman; his best friend was the author Leslie Epstein. A Woodrow Wilson fellow and Fulbright recipient, he went on to study at Balliol College, Oxford, and spent time in the Air Force Reserve. After his discharge, he worked for Congressman Sidney R. Yates.

In 1963, Newman became an instructor in the English department at Northwestern University and took over the campus literary magazine, known as TriQuarterly, which he soon transformed into “an international journal showcasing the world's most eminent writers.” In 1975 he left Northwestern to become director of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, but withdrew from academia soon afterward to raise hunting dogs in the Shenandoah Valley. He returned to teaching in 1985 at Washington University in St. Louis, his birth city, and remained on the faculty there until his death in 2006.

Newman was married four times but had no children.

Newman’s first novel, New Axis, was published in 1966, and portrays the community of King’s Kove, an affluent but ahistoric suburb resembling the one in which Newman grew up. The New York Times faulted New Axis for its “uncritical affection” toward a community that is “so bleak . . . that to come upon it even in a book is to be oppressed by its narrowness.” However, Time called the book’s satire “subtle and precise,” and praised Newman’s writing as “almost too elegant.”Life called New Axis “one of the two or three fiction discoveries of the year.”

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