Barry Gifford Poet Playwright Critic Author Of Memoirs Short Stories

Barry Gifford is a poet, author and playwright. His works reflect the grim side of American reality often with a degree of black humor. Gifford has written poems, novels, memoirs, short stories, film screenplays as well as literary and film criticisms. His novel, Memories of a Sinking Ship won the Christopher Isherwwod Foundation Prize for Fiction in 2006.

Barry Gifford first came into the limelight with his novel Wild at Heart which was published in 1990. The exploration of a psyche driven by lust and destructive desires was continued in other works of the same series like The Wild Life of Sailor and Lula. These works follow the two star-crossed lovers on the road as they get involved with the mob and a sequence of bizarre incidents.

Other novels to follow from Barry Gifford were Night People, Perdita Durango, and then Wyoming. His first major collection of short stories was American Falls which covered a broad range of themes and were written in various literary styles. Another short stories collection which gained literary attention was Do the Blind Dream?

Barry Gifford has revealed many shades of his difficult childhood in several memoirs among which one of the best is The Phantom Father which was named a New York Times notable book. Other writings by Gifford like The Cavalry Charges, Read Em and Weep and Back in America reveal an eclectic mix of literary criticisms, memoirs and comments on American society and culture. Again the work titled, The Rooster Trapped in a Reptile Room includes extracts from his previous novels and other literary works in an episodic sequence.

Barry Gifford has also written several screenplays for films, either in collaboration or alone. Some of these have been for screen adaptations of his own novels like Wild at Heart and Perdita Durango or for the trilogy of plays, Hotel Room. Other than these Gifford has collaborated in writing the screenplays for documentaries like Lost Highway, Bordertown or films like Il Carnevale, Ball Lighting and City of Ghosts.

Giffords writings seem to be influenced by the quirky madness and the dark humor of artistic genres like film noir and the works of the Beat generation. These influences are evident in his collection of essays like Out of Past and fictions like Don the Blind Dream? At the same time Barry Gifford is also a sensitive poet and his Replies to Wang Wei are tender imaginative responses to Wang Wei who was one of the most famous poets of the Tang dynasty in China. Barry Gifford