Katherine Dunn
Katherine Dunn was an American author born on October 24, 1945, in Garden City, Kansas, and raised in Oregon. She developed a passion for writing at an early age, leading her to pursue a career in literature despite early life challenges, including a stint in jail during her teenage years. Dunn’s literary journey began with her first novel, *Attic*, published in 1970, which drew from her own experiences. However, it was her 1989 work, *Geek Love*, that garnered significant acclaim, presenting a darkly satirical exploration of abnormality and societal norms through the lens of a carnival family engaged in grotesque genetic experiments.
Over her career, Dunn also engaged in nonfiction writing and taught creative writing, exploring themes of beauty and societal perceptions through various narratives. Her projects included a book on boxing, *One Ring Circus*, which compiled her extensive writings on the sport. Although she had plans for further novels, her untimely death in 2016 from lung cancer left some works unpublished. Dunn’s unique voice and imaginative storytelling continue to influence discussions on normality, beauty, and the human condition.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Katherine Dunn
- Born: October 24, 1945
- Birthplace: Garden City, Kansas
- Died: May 11, 2016
- Place of death: Portland, Oregon
Biography
Although she would spend most of her childhood moving up and down the West Coast before her family settled just outside of Portland, Oregon (her father was a Linotype operator and went where he could find work), Katherine Karen Dunn was actually born in Garden City, Kansas, on October 24, 1945. An avid reader whose family relished the joy of storytelling, Dunn decided by the age of six that she would be a writer. Before she was eighteen, Dunn ran away from home and ended up jailed in Leavenworth, Kansas, for kiting bad checks. The experience convinced her to return to Portland, where she briefly attended Portland State College before securing a scholarship to Portland’s Reed College, a small liberal arts college with an experimental curriculum and a reputation for encouraging free-thinking among its undergraduates.
Dunn’s first novel, 1970’s Attic, was largely autobiographical, relating the story of a teenage magazine seller who is jailed for writing bad checks. The book scored modest success, and its sales earned Dunn enough to travel in Europe, where she quickly completed the manuscript for her second novel, 1971’s Truck, a harrowing account of a teenage runaway. Discouraged by an indifferent critical reaction, Dunn spent the next twelve years freelancing articles, writing an advice column for a Portland newspaper, and working as a voice-over for radio commercials. All the while, she began researching both religious cults, whose dark logic and mysterious power structures had always fascinated her, and revolutionary breakthroughs in the new field of bioengineering.
When Geek Love was published in 1989, Dunn had clearly broken with the semiautobiographical genre: A carnival family decides to use bizarre genetic experiments as well as arsenic and radiation to produce their own family menagerie of carnival oddities and then takes these grotesques on the road, a freak show that inspires both devotion from a fanatic following and revulsion from those unable to see beyond the obscene deformities of the family members. Under Dunn’s imaginative excesses, the novel becomes a satire of the American obsession with normalcy—one family member, born with flippers for hands and feet, inspires a cultlike following of people who amputate their own limbs; in another storyline, a rich woman pays beautiful women to undergo painful surgery to disfigure themselves so they can find their true selves without the distractions of surface beauty. With its surrealistic humor and imaginative excess, the novel won wide critical acclaim and was nominated for the National Book Award.
Following Geek Love’s publication, Dunn taught creative writing at Lewis and Clark College and pursued nonfiction projects, including a shocking “scrapbook” of actual police photos from murder scenes as well as a nonfiction account of artist Alexis Rockman’s journey into the jungles of Guyana, where he found a forbidding dreamlike natural landscape teeming with the bizarre and the grotesque. As she had been interested in the sport of boxing for some time, working with photographer Jim Lommasson on a project that won the 2004 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize that became the book Shadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice and the Will to Survive in American Boxing Gyms (2005), a collection of articles she had written on the topic over the span of at least thirty years was published in 2009 as One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing. With outrageous imaginative flair and a disturbing, always astringent satiric eye, Dunn used narratives to test the often thin line between beauty and ugliness and between what is accepted as normal and what is seen as aberrant.
Though Dunn had said that she was working on a fourth novel—about boxing—and it was reported that the work would be published in 2008, as of 2017 the book had yet to be published. After a battle with lung cancer, Dunn died on May 11, 2016, in Portland, Oregon, at the age of seventy.
Bibliography
Dunn, Katherine. "Katherine Dunn." Interview by Caitlin Roper. The Paris Review, 14 June 2010, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/06/14/qa-katherine-dunn/. Accessed 16 Nov. 2017.
Kellogg, Carolyn. "Katherine Dunn Has Died; the Geek Love Author Once Took the World by Storm." Los Angeles Times, 12 May 2016, www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-katherine-dunn-geek-love-20160512-snap-story.html. Accessed 16 Nov. 2017.
Lapointe, Michael. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Convict." The Atlantic, Oct. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/katherine-dunn-geek-love-attic/537879/. Accessed 16 Nov. 2017.
Mesh, Aaron. "The Strange and Beautiful Life of Katherine Dunn, Portland's Beloved Geek." Willamette Week, 17 May 2016, www.wweek.com/news/2016/05/18/the-twisted-and-beautiful-life-of-katherine-dunn-portlands-beloved-geek/. Accessed 16 Nov. 2017.
Roberts, Sam. "Katherine Dunn, Author of Geek Love, Dies at 70." The New York Times, 14 May 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/books/katherine-dunn-author-of-geek-love-dies-at-70.html. Accessed 16 Nov. 2017.