DeWitt Henry

Selected Works

Memoir
Hidden River Press. 2011. 252 pages. This is a moving, sepia-toned, and powerful look at the bonds of a family, but it also tracks the development of a deeply gifted writer and his dedication to American letters. This resonant memoir is by turns poignant and harrowing, and with each new page, I felt the exhilarating rush of recognition. In writing about his family, DeWitt Henry ushers his readers to better understandings of their own histories. --Bret Anthony Johnston, author of CORPUS CHRISTI: STORIES
Red Hen Press, 2008. 190 pp."As with any flat-out wonderful book, a few words of praise cannot begin to do it justice. But here goes: SAFE SUICIDE is elegantly written, edgy, touching, inventive, surprising in its shifts of style and form, and completely spellbinding from start to finish. Partly memoir, partly a sequence of interlocked essays, this is a book that works its way under your skin and down into your vital organs. It is really, really good."--Tim O’Brien, author of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED.
Novel
Winner of the 2000 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel
Anthology
Essays that reflect the tenacity, the strength to go forward and to love. Beacon Press, 2001. 219 pp.
Co-edited with James Alan McPherson. Beacon Press, 1999. 252 pp.
A collection of first or very early fiction by now prominent authors as it appeared in the prizewinning journal Ploughshares over the past three decades.

The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts

Peter Taylor Prize
Click cover to order A novel of profound and humane realism. Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. 224 pp. Hardcover.

Long known as an essayist and editor, and co-founder of Ploughshares literary magazine, Henry has published his first novel, winner of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel. It is the story of a working-class Philadelphia woman whose life is upset by the death of her father and her younger sister's takeover of the family home. The protagonist is forced out of the house and soon develops an unusual relationship—which becomes a marriage—with an older co-worker. She struggles to legitimize her place in her new husband's life and restore her own inner strength.