Tom Franklin (author)
| Thomas Gerald Franklin | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 7, 1963 |
| Occupation | Writer, professor |
| Ethnicity | American |
| Alma mater | M.F.A., University of Arkansas B.A., University of South Alabama |
| Genre | Crime fiction, regional fiction, mystery |
| Spouse | Beth Ann Fennelly |
| Children | 1 daughter, 2 sons |
Thomas Gerald Franklin (born July 7, 1963) is an American writer originally from Dickinson, Alabama., "a town of around 500 people in south central Alabama, near Monroeville, home of "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee". In a recent interview, Franklin reveals the role imagination played during his younger years as he grew up "playing with G. I. Joes and imagining their lives. Building sci-fi forts from cardboard boxes and bricks, drawing control panels on the walls, etc. I liked creating the forts more than I did playing in them. There was something wonderful about making something tangible, something others could see, participate in. Then I moved to drawing my own comic books. I loved comic books–Marvel, DC. I collected them and had a couple of thousand of them. I drew one sci-fi comic book (a rip-off of Space 1999 and BattleStar Galactica) that numbered up to like 24 or 25. I was serious about it. Then I started writing barbarian stories. I loved Tarzan and Conan the Barbarian and so wrote a lot of bad imitations of those." Interestingly, Franklin was a marginal student; for example, in high school, he characterized himself as a "C student. Instead of reading Romeo and Juliet, I was reading Stephen King. I hated math, [and] failed algebra twice."
After high school, Franklin worked his way through college, earning a B.A. at the University of South Alabama, in Mobile, Alabama. "holding odd jobs at warehouses and plants, including a stint cleaning up hazardous waste for a chemical plant.". He completed his M.F.A.from the University of Arkansas, in 1998 where he met his wife, poet Beth Ann Fennelly.
He is currently an associate professor at the University of Mississippi.
Though some characterize Franklin as being a crime writer, his fiction is much more diverse, and he is best described as being a Southern writer, who is often compared to Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor.
Franklin's first book is collection of ten short stories, Poachers (1999), the title story of which won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Short Story. In an interview for the website Mississippi Writers and Musicians, its author writes of the book as being " stories that address the injustice and irony that life can sometimes have as well as the corruption present in daily life. Franklin puts his characters in situations where temptation makes the line between right and wrong unclear at times."
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