J. F. Powers (8 July 1917 Jacksonville, Illinois

Jacksonville, Illinois

Jacksonville is a city in Morgan County, Illinois, United States. The population was 18,940 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Morgan County....

 - 12 June 1999 Collegeville

Collegeville

Collegeville may refer to some places in the United States:*Collegeville, Alabama*Collegeville, Indiana*Collegeville Township, Minnesota*Collegeville, Pennsylvania...

, Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

) was a Roman Catholic American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 novelist and short-story writer who often drew his inspiration from developments in the Catholic Church, and was known for his studies of midwestern Catholic priests. Although not a priest himself, he is credited with having captured a "clerical idiom" in the postwar era in North America. His first writing experiment began as a spiritual exercise during a religious retreat.

Powers was a conscientious objector

Conscientious objector

A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, and/or religion....

 during World War II, which resulted in a prison sentence; later he worked as a hospital orderly.

Although Powers's published output was rather slim, it has long been admired by a devoted band of followers who appreciate his gentle satire and astonishing ability to recreate with a few words the insular but gradually changing world of post-WWII American Catholicism. Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...

 and Walker Percy

Walker Percy

Walker Percy was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962...

 praised his work, and Frank O'Connor

Frank O'Connor

Frank O’Connor was an Irish author of over 150 works, best known for his short stories and memoirs.-Early life:...

 declared him as "among the greatest living storytellers"

Prince of Darkness and Other Stories appeared in 1947. The Presence of Grace (1956) was also a collection of short stories. Morte d'Urban (1963), which won the National Book Award

National Book Award

The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...

 for fiction the year it was published, was his first novel. Look How the Fish Live appeared in 1975 and Wheat that Springeth Green in 1988.

After moving back and forth from Ireland, Powers settled with his family in Collegeville, Minnesota, where he taught Creative writing

Creative writing

Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...

 and English literature

English literature

English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

.

Published works

• 1947 — Prince of Darkness and Other Stories
• 1949 — Cross Country. St. Paul, Home of the Saints.
• 1962 — Morte d'Urban - novel
• 1963 — Lions, Harts, Leaping Does, and Other Stories
• 1969 — The Presence of Grace
• 1975 — Look How the Fish Live
• 1988 — Wheat that Springeth Green
  Wheat that Springeth Green
  Wheat That Springeth Green is the final novel written by JF Powers. Powers chronicles the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of Joe Hackett, a Midwestern Catholic who becomes a priest and dreams of being a saint. It was published by the New York Review of Books in 1988....
  
  - novel
• 1991 — The Old Bird, A Love Story
• 1999 — The Stories of J. F. Powers