William Abrahams
William Miller Abrahams was an American author and editor, born on January 23, 1919, in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1941 and served in the U.S. Army military police during World War II. Abrahams published his first novel, "Interval in Carolina," in 1945, which received positive reviews, leading to a successful writing career that included four more novels by 1963. His editorial career began in 1955 at The Atlantic Monthly Press, where he became a senior editor and played a vital role in the O. Henry Awards. In this position, he curated a wide range of short stories, significantly influencing the genre and promoting emerging writers. Throughout his career, Abrahams collaborated with historian Peter Stansky on several works, addressing topics like the Spanish Civil War and George Orwell. He continued to impact literature until his death on June 2, 1998, in California, leaving behind a legacy as a notable editor and author in the literary community.
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William Abrahams
Writer
- Born: January 23, 1919
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
- Died: June 2, 1998
- Place of death: Hillsborough, California
Biography
William Miller Abrahams was born on January 23, 1919, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of Louis Abrahams, a lawyer, and Wilhelmina Miller Abrahams. He received his B.A. from Harvard University in 1941. From 1942 to 1945, he was a member of a United States Army military police unit, assigned to Miami. From 1949 to 1950, Abrahams held a fellowship at Stanford.
Although poems by Abrahams had appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, his first book-length work was the novel Interval in Carolina (1945), a story about love in wartime. The book was favorably reviewed, as were the three novels that followed. The last of them appeared in 1963.
In 1955, Abrahams joined the editorial staff of The Atlantic Monthly Press, where in 1963 he became a senior editor. Richard Poirier, editor of the prestigious O. Henry Awards, soon recruited him to screen short stories, and in 1965, Abrahams took over the series. Every year, he would gather a thousand stories for initial consideration, reread a hundred of them, and finally choose twenty for publication. He would also award first, second, and third prizes. Though some of the writers whose works Abrahams selected were already well-known, others came to prominence only after Abrahams included their fiction in the O. Henry series.
Abrahams also published four books written in collaboration with his longtime partner, the historian Peter Stansky. The men met while Stansky was still working on his doctorate at Harvard. At Yale, Stansky had written his senior thesis on the involvement of young English writers in the Spanish Civil War. Since Abrahams also found the subject interesting, they decided to work together both in research and in writing. Journey to the Frontier: Two Roads to the Spanish Civil War (1966), which dealt with John Cornford and Julian Bell, was followed by a biography of Eric Blair, better known as the writer George Orwell.
In 1968, Stansky left Harvard for a position as associate professor of history at Stanford, and The Atlantic Monthly Press transferred Abrahams to the San Francisco area, where he became their West Coast editor. In 1977, Abrahams became senior West Coast editor for Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. He began publishing works under his own imprint, William Abrahams Books, in 1982; two years later, he took the imprint to E. P. Dutton. Stansky and Abrahams collaborated on one more work, London’s Burning: Life, Death, and Art in the Second World War (1994). On June 2, 1998, Abrahams died of congestive heart failure at his home in Hillsborough, California.
Although the works he wrote with Stansky were well reviewed and Orwell: The Transformation was nominated for an American Book Award, it was as an editor that Abrahams had the greatest impact on the literary world. His critical insights were invaluable to such distinguished authors as Lillian Hellman, Jessica Mitford, Joyce Carol Oates, and Diane Johnson, and his unfailing good judgment during three decades as editor of the O. Henry Awards not only launched a number of literary careers but also helped to give the short story genre a new importance.