David Plante

David Robert Plante (born March 4, 1940 in Providence, Rhode Island) is an American novelist. The son of Albina Bisson and Aniclet Plante, he is of both French-Canadian and North American Indian descent.^[1] He is a graduate of Boston College and the Université catholique de Louvain.^[2] He has been published extensively including in The New Yorker and The Paris Review and various literary magazines. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.^[2] Among his honours are: Henfield Fellow, University of East Anglia, 1975; British Arts Council Grant, 1977; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1983; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, 1983. He is an Ambassador for the LGBT Committee of the New York Public Library. His voluminous diary is kept in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. His papers are kept in the library of The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is a retired professor of creative writing at Columbia University.^[2] His novels examine the spiritual in a variety of contexts, but notably in the milieu of large, working-class, Catholic families of French Canadian background. His male characters range from openly gay to sexually ambiguous and questioning.

He has been a writer-in-residence at Gorki Institute of Literature (Moscow), the Université du Québec à Montréal, Adelphi University, King's College, the University of Cambridge, Tulsa University, and the University of East Anglia.^[2] Plante’s work, for which he has been nominated for the National Book Award, includes Difficult Women (1983), a memoir of his relationships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer and the widely-praised Francoeur Trilogy--The Family (1978), The Country (1980) and The Woods (1982). His most recent book is a memoir of Nikos Stangos, his partner of forty years, The Pure Lover (2009).^[3] The papers of his former partner, Nikos Stangos (1936-2004), are in The Princeton University Library, the Program in Hellenic Studies. Plante lives in London, Lucca Italy, and Athens Greece. He has dual citizenship, American and British.

Bibliography

• The Ghost of Henry James (1970)
• Slides (1971)
• Relatives (1972)
• The Darkness of the Body (1974)
• Figures in Bright Air (1976)
• The Family (1978)
• The Country (1980)
• The Woods (1982)
• Difficult Women (1983)
• The Foreigner (1984)
• The Catholic (1986)
• My Mother's Pearl Necklace (1987)
• The Native (1987)
• The Accident (1991)
• Annunciation (1994)
• The Age of Terror (1999)
• American Ghosts (2005)
• ABC (2007)
• The Pure Lover (2009)

References

1. ^ glbtq
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Columbia webpage
3. ^ Critic comments include:
   • From Publishers Weekly
   In this simple, heartfelt memoir, author Plante (The Family, American Ghosts) shares a series of disjointed memories about his lover for 40 years, the recently deceased Nikos. Reflecting the way longtime partners become one, even Nikos's earliest first-person recollections enter into Plante's memoir, including dreamy passages about Nikos's childhood in Greece: watching his mother leave, witnessing his father dying in bed, attending college in the U.S. Having met in London in their mid-20s, Plante and Nikos immediately began a relationship that would last a lifetime. Readers unfamiliar with either man's literary legacy won't get much of an education; references to their careers are sparing, and the absence not only keeps readers at arm's-length, but gives the material an unanchored feel. The book ultimately seems written for an audience of two, rather than a general readership; Plante's intimate, guarded tone keeps readers feeling like intruders. Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
   • “How a book can be at once so raw and so artful is a mystery; The Pure Lover joins a handful of necessary volumes that speak directly from grief’s wild, inconsolable center, and readers will find it bracing, unflinching, and honest to the core.” —Mark Doty, author of Heaven’s Coast
   • “A wrenching and boldly intimate lament.” —Philip Roth
   • “The Pure Lover leaves one exalted . . . A lovely book, joyful, plangent and true.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
   • “The Pure Lover is a short but moving elegy. . . . It’s a difficult subject, handled with lyricism, pain, indiscretion and love.” —Margaret Drabble, New Statesman
   • “David Plante’s fine meditation on love and loss is the work of one who has been there and who knows that it is the dying who are losing all and that the grief we obtain is the survivor’s treasure.” —Edward Albee
   • “Innovative and incantatory . . . Bracingly poignant . . . A cumulative portrait, taken in snapshots, of a long-term gay relationship that’s as valid a marriage as any other.” —Jason Roush, The Gay and Lesbian Review
   • “A fierce encapsulation of grief, the fundamentally private wrought wrenchingly public. This sublime remembrance—more a compilation of memory fragments than a linear life story—evokes a whole man (in truth, two whole men).” —Richard Labonte, Book Marks: Best of 2009

External links

• Review of Plante's ABC: A Novel (2007) from The New York Review of Books
• Interview on Bookworm, January 10, 2008.

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Name	Plante, David
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Date of birth	March 4, 1940
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