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Permission to publish or reproduce is required from the copyright holder. For more information, please see the Permissions and Copyright page on the West Virginia and Regional History Center website.

Conditions Governing Access

No special access restriction applies.

Preferred Citation

[Description and date of item], [Box/folder number], Jayne Anne Phillips, Author, Papers, A&M 4571, West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, West Virginia.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Purchase from Phillips, Jayne Anne, 2022 May 18
Purchase from Internet Vendor, 2021 September 20

Biographical / Historical

Jayne Anne Phillips is an American novelist and short story writer born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She graduated from West Virginia University with a B.A. in 1974 and later completed the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. In the mid-1970s, she left West Virginia for California on a cross-country trip that would lead to numerous jobs, experiences, and encounters that would greatly affect her fiction, however many of her works use the mountain state iteself as subject and inspiration.

Phillips has held teaching positions at several colleges and universities, including Harvard University, Williams College, Brandeis University, and Boston University. She is currently a Professor of English and founder/director of the Rutgers University–Newark Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program. During its inaugural year, The Atlantic magazine named Phillips' MFA program at Rutgers–Newark to its list of "Five Up-and-Coming " creative writing programs in the United States. Phillips' works have been translated and published in twelve foreign languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, and numerous other awards, including Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction for Black Tickets (1979), The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Lark and Termite (2008), and an Academy Award in Literature for Shelter (1994) presented by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She and her works have also been selected as finalists for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle in Fiction, and the Prix de Medici Étrangers (Paris).

For more information about current projects and a detailed biography, please visit https://jayneannephillips.com/.

(Adapted from "Biography ", Jayne Anne Phillips Official Website . Accessed January, 2024. https://jayneannephillips.com/biography/.)

Scope and Contents

This collection includes manuscripts, correspondence, research notes, photographs, artifacts, and publications of author Jayne Anne Phillips.

Box 1 includes original, edited, and published drafts of Jayne Anne Phillips' work, including her books Quiet Dell and MotherKind , the essay "Love's Labor's Lost, " and drafts of works related to Breece D'J Pancake. This set of material also includes collected materials used for research during the writing of, and correspondence about, these publications.

Boxes 2 and 3 and the oversize folders include clippings and publications in which Jayne Anne Phillips was mentioned or featured, including several foreign language items. Materials consist of newspapers, magazines, and printed articles. Most notable is an issue of Rolling Stone with "Mean Fiction ", a short story by Jayne Anne Phillips, in Oversize Folder 1.

Box 2, folder 6 includes a small selection of essays by and about Jayne Anne Phillips, correspondence from Library of America editorial director John Kulka, and original photographs of Jayne Anne Phillips.

This collection also contains a framed item, Phillips' grade-school cheerleading suit.

Subjects and Indexing Terms

• American fiction -- West Virginia
• Authors -- Letters and papers
• Authors, American -- 20th Century
• Authors, American -- Appalachian Region
• Authors, American -- West Virginia
• Novelists, American -- West Virginia
• Pancake, Breece D'J, 1952-1979
• Phillips, Jayne Anne
• Phillips, Jayne Anne
• West Virginia -- Fiction
• Women authors, American -- 20th century
• Women authors, American -- West Virginia -- 20th century