Monette, Paul

Biography

Paul Landry Monette was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on October 16, 1945; BA, English, Yale, 1967; taught at Cheshire Academy, Connecticut, 1968-70; taught at Milton Academy, Massachusetts, and Pine Manor College, 1970-76; published first book of poetry, The Looker-on: Fra Angelico, Crucifixion, About 1450 (1973); met Roger Horwitz in 1974 and the two of them moved to Los Angeles, California, 1977; writings include Carpenter at the Asylum (1975), Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978), The Gold Diggers (1979), Long Shot (1981), and No Witnesses (1981); after Horwitz's death in 1986, Monette wrote Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog (1988), Borrowed Time: an AIDS Memoir (1988), Afterlife (1990), and Halfway Home (1991); Monette's work, Borrowed Time: an AIDS Memoir, was nominated as best biography for the National Book Critics' Circle Award; Monette wrote of his struggle for identity as a gay man in his book, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (1992), which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1992; final publications include Last Watch of the Night (1994) and West of Yesterday, East of Summer (1994); he was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1990 and died of complications from AIDS on February 10, 1995.

Biographical Note

Several printed obituaries and appreciations have been collected in Special Collections URL and can be found in the papers. Major critical overviews include those in Contemporary Authors: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields vol. 139, edited by Donna Olendorf. Detroit, Washington, D.C., London: Gale Research Incorporated, [1993], Gay & Lesbian Literature, edited by Sharon Malinowski. Detroit and London: St. James Press, [1994], and Paul Monette, by David Roman, in Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwod Press, 1994.

A Chronology of Paul Monette

By Paula Zeszotarski