Robert Clark Young

From Freepedia

Robert Clark Young (born 1960) is an American author of novels, essays, and short stories. Recurring themes in Young's work include the relation between alcoholism, the abuse of power, and institutional dysfunction in American life, within contemporary and historical contexts.

Born in Hollywood, California, Young was raised in Los Angeles and San Diego and won fellowships to study writing at the University of San Diego; the University of California, Davis, where he studied with Beat Generation author Gary Snyder; and the University of Houston, in the doctoral Creative Writing Program founded by postmodern satirist Donald Barthelme. Young's first teaching job, when he was 25, was as a civilian working on U.S. Navy ships deployed throughout the Far East. This experience would form the basis for his first novel, One of the Guys, published by HarperCollins in 1999.

One of the Guys is a picaresque satire about a man impersonating a U.S. Navy chaplain on a ship that suffers a series of comic misadventures in the Far East. The novel gained notoriety shortly after publication when the American Family Association objected to Young's portrayal of a man posing as a Christian chaplain during deployment to ports where an alcoholic crew avails itself of child prostitution. The AFA, which had previously used the work of artists to attack the funding practices of the National Endowment for the Arts, lobbied the U.S. Congress to have the agency defunded.

Young responded, in The Washington Post and elsewhere, that the controversial sections of One of the Guys were not pornographic, but had been written to expose what he saw as the U.S. Navy's complicity in child prostitution overseas. He perceived an inconsistency in the AFA objecting to taxpayer funding of a book that exposed and criticized sexual exploitation, when the AFA should have been objecting to taxpayer funding of the exploitation itself.

One of the Guys was subsequently nominated for the PEN/Newman's Own Award, which recognizes authors who have stood up to censorship in the United States.

Young continued to write and publish in the wake of the One of the Guys controversy, furthering his exploration of the links between alcoholism, abuse of power, and social dysfunction in American life. He began work on a multi-volume historical novel based on the half-century of conflict between the alcoholic pro-German newspaper publisher Cissy Patterson and her daughter, the Countess Felicia Gizycka, who was one of the founding female members of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first volume, The Richest Girl in the World, dramatizes, with much of the same humor and pathos Young brought to bear in One of the Guys, the ways in which alcohol, money, and institutional power combined to destroy a wealthy and influential American family.

Over the years, Young has also developed his own brand of satirical new journalism, blending elements of creative nonfiction and black comedy. One Writer’s Big Innings, a comic look at the struggles of a young writer, first appeared in the Black Warrior Review in 1992, was reprinted in AWP Chronicle the same year, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and won the Black Warrior Review’s Best of the 1990s Nonfiction Award in 2002. The essay is notable for the wry jabs it takes at many of the established writers of the era. The black comedy Mimi and Cecilia: A Recollection, which appeared in the Santa Monica Review in 2003 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Joy Williams, took a biting and often hilarious look at family issues of alcoholism.

When not writing, Young has been active in the anti-war movement and was arrested twice in 2003 for nonviolent protest of the Iraq War.

References

Collier, Gene, NEA Foes Miss Boat on Satire, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, October 25, 2000

Garvin, Cosmo Moral Minority, Sacramento News and Review, March 1, 2001

Hansen, Suzy, Our Wolves in Uniform Salon.com, March 22, 2001

McInerney, Tom, NEA Funding up Despite Criticism Poets and Writers Magazine, January 2001

Quinn, Brad, In the Navy Cincinnati CityBeat, November 16, 2000

Sherwin, Elisabeth, First Amendment Sweethearts, Bob and Isabel, Davis Enterprise, October 15, 2000

Sherwin, Elisabeth, Meet Countess Felicia, The Richest Girl in the World, Davis Enterprise, August 1, 2005

Young, Robert Clark, A Strange 'Family Values' Attack on the NEA Washington Post, December 15, 2000

Young, Robert Clark, Mimi and Cecilia: A Recollection Santa Monica Review, Spring, 2003

Young, Robert Clark, One Writer’s Big Innings Black Warrior Review, Fall, 1992

Young, Robert Clark, "The Richest Girl in the World" (excerpt), Southern Humanities Review, Spring 2005, published at Auburn University by the Southern Humanities Council