Р.А. Лафферти: Американдық жазушының өмірі мен шығармашылығы

American writer

Raphael Aloysius "R. A." Lafferty (November 7, 1914March 18, 2002) was an American science fiction and fantasy writer known for his original use of language, metaphor, and narrative structure, Lafferty also wrote a set of four autobiographical novels, a history book, and several novels of historical fiction.

Lafferty was born on November 7, 1914, in Neola, Iowa to devoutly Catholic parents, Hugh David Lafferty, a broker dealing in oil leases and royalties, and Julia Mary ( Burke), a teacher. He was born the youngest of five siblings. His first name, Raphael, derived from the day on which he was expected to be born (the Feast of St. Raphael). When he was 4, his family moved to Perry, Oklahoma. He graduated from Cascia Hall, and came of age in the early years of the Great Depression. He later attended night school at the University of Tulsa for two years starting in 1933, mostly studying Math and German, but left before graduating. He then began to work for Clark Electric Co. in Tulsa and, during this period (1939–42), he attended the International Correspondence School. Lafferty lived most of his life in Tulsa with his sister, Anna Lafferty. He enlisted in the U. S. Army in 1942. After training in Texas, North Carolina, Florida, and California, he was sent to the South Pacific Area, serving in Australia, New Guinea, Morotai, and the Philippines. When he left the Army in 1946, he had become a 1st Sergeant serving as a staff sergeant and had received an Asiatic Pacific Campaign Medal. He never married. Lafferty did not begin writing until the 1950s, but he wrote thirty two novels and more than two hundred short stories, most of them at least nominally science fiction. His first published story was "The Wagons" in the New Mexico Quarterly Review in 1959. His first published science fiction story was "Day of the Glacier", in The Original Science Fiction Stories in 1960, and his first published novel was Past Master in 1968. Until 1971, Lafferty worked as an electrical engineer. After that, he spent his time writing until around 1980, when his output declined due to a stroke. He stopped writing regularly in 1984. Lafferty's funeral took place at Christ the King Catholic Church in Tulsa, where he regularly attended daily Mass. He is buried at St. Rose Catholic Cemetery in Perry. which holds a cache of his unpublished manuscripts. This includes over a dozen novels, such as In The Akrokeraunian Mountains and Iron Tongue of Midnight, as well as about eighty short stories and a handful of essays.

Lafferty received Hugo nominations for Past Master, "Continued on Next Rock", "Sky", and "Eurema's Dam", the last of which won the Best Short Story Hugo in 1973 (shared with Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's "The Meeting"). He received Nebula Award nominations for "In Our Block", "Slow Tuesday Night", Past Master, Fourth Mansions, "Continued on Next Rock", "Entire And Perfect Chrysolite", and The Devil is Dead. He never received a Nebula award. The Oklahoma Department of Libraries granted him the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. Fourth Mansions was also named by David Pringle as one of his selections for Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels.

"[Once a] French publisher nervously asked whether Lafferty minded being compared to G. K. Chesterton (another Catholic author), and there was a terrifying silence that went on and on. Was the great man hideously offended? Eventually, very slowly, he said: 'You're on the right track, kid,' and wandered away." In his 2006 short story collection Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman includes a short story called "Sunbird" written in the style of Lafferty. In the introduction, he says this about Lafferty: There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma (he died in 2002), who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable you knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young I wrote to him, and he wrote back. "Sunbird" was my attempt to write a Lafferty story, and it taught me a number of things, mostly how much harder they are than they look

Gaiman and Lafferty had corresponded for several years during Gaiman's adolescence; he remembered Lafferty's letters as "filled with typical cock eyed Lafferty humour and observations, wise and funny and sober all at once." Per the Science Fiction Encyclopedia: "He has fairly been described as a writer of tall tales, as a cartoonist, as an author whose tone was fundamentally oral; his conservative Catholicism has been seen as permeating every word he wrote (or has been ignored); he has been seen as a ransacker of old Mythologies, and as a flippant generator of new ones; he clearly delighted in a vision of the world as being irradiated by conspiracies both godly and devilish, but at times paid scant attention to the niceties of plotting; he has been understood by some as essentially light hearted and by others as a solitary, stringent moralist; he was technically inventive, but lunged constantly into a slapdash sublime only skittishly evocative, and only occasionally, of anything like the traditional Sense of Wonder; his skill in the deploying of various rhetorical narrative voices was manifest, but these voices were sometimes choked in baroque flamboyance He and Gene Wolfe have more than a shared faith in common."