ABISH, Walter
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Walter Abish was born in Vienna, Austria, on December 24th, 1931 but spent his childhood in Shanghai, where his family were refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1949 the whole family moved to Israel, where Abish served in the army and developed strong interests in architecture and writing. He left Israel for the United States in 1957, becoming an American citizen in 1960. Abish taught English at several eastern colleges and universities.
Abish uses the English language whimsically in his writings. In Alphabetical Africa, for instance, in the first of the 52 chapters all the words begin with the letter "A," the second chapter adds words beginning with "B," and so forth through the alphabet. Returning through the alphabet, in each chapter he drops words from each of the letters. Abish uses language symbolically in his book of short stories, Minds Meet, and creates different word patterns in the experimental stories of In the Future Perfect. In How German Is It/Wie Deutsch ist es, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1981, Abish wrote a novel of postwar Germany. Abish is a grant recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as well as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Walter won the Lila Wallace – Reader’s Digest Award as well as the 1991 Award of Merit Medal form the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He currently resides in New York. |
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| Most Famous Works from earliest to latest:
• Duel Site (poetry — 1970) |
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