Who is William Vollmann? He was born in Santa Monica in 1959, moving to New Hampshire as a child and later to Bloomington, Indiana, where he went to high school, his father a professor at the local university. He attended his first two years of college at the elite and remote Deep Springs College before matriculating at Cornell, from which he graduated summa cum laude. As a child, Vollmann was bullied, at least according to his own testimony, and a seemingly pivotal event of his youth was the tragic drowning of his 6-year-old sister, who had been left in Vollmann’s care. “I had nightmares practically every night of her skeleton chasing me and punishing me, pretty much through high school,” he has said. “I felt very uncomfortable at home; I felt that I wasn’t exactly wanted there.”Later, equally impactful were the deaths of two colleagues, assistants of a sort, who were helping the journalist Vollmann in covering the Balkan Wars. This episode is discussed at the very beginning of Rising Up, Rising Down.
Early in his career, Vollmann was sometimes linked with novelists like Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and even the much older Thomas Pynchon. But the idiosyncratic Vollmann has shown himself to be sui generis, combining the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson with the prose style of Nabokov and the ambitions of Zola. After leaving Cornell, he travelled to Afghanistan, first having written to former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, soliciting advice on how the trip might be most fruitful; this adventure, obviously somewhat quixotic, led to his first book An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or How I Saved the World. He later took a job as a computer programmer in Silicon Valley, despite knowing little code. Sleeping under his desk, subsisting on candy bars, writing what would become his first novel, Vollmann quickly completed You Bright and Risen Angels, a gigantic and controversial book informed by frequent visits among sex workers in San Francisco, a long-standing interest, if not preoccupation. Indeed, many of Vollmann’s subsequent novels and short stories (which, with often frightening effect, seamlessly blend fiction and non-fiction) are situated among, and address the daily lives of, sex workers. Ingratiating himself to the skeptical prostitutes, Vollmann has admitted to smoking crack around 100 times. A similar personal and intellectual solicitude has been extended to skinheads and other marginalized groups.
Nothing if not fecund, Vollmann’s books include the following:
Novels and collections
- You Bright and Risen Angels (1987)
- The Rainbow Stories (1989) (collection)
- 13 Stories and 13 Epitaphs (1991) (collection)
- The Atlas (1996) (collection)
- Europe Central (2005)
- Last Stories and Other Stories (2014) (collection)
- The Lucky Star (2020)
- How You Are (forthcoming)
- A Table for Fortune (forthcoming)
Seven Dreams series
- The Ice-Shirt (1990) (Volume One)
- Fathers and Crows (1992) (Volume Two)
- Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (2001) (Volume Three)
- The Dying Grass (2015) (Volume Five)
- The Rifles (1994) (Volume Six)
The “Prostitution Trilogy”
- Whores for Gloria (1991)
- Butterfly Stories: A Novel (1993)
- The Royal Family (2000)
Non-fiction
- An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (1992)
- Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means (2003)
- Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (2006) (Part of the “Great Discoveries” series)
- Poor People (2007)
- Riding Toward Everywhere (2008)
- Imperial (2009)
- Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater (2010)
- Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan (2011) (eBook)
- The Book of Dolores (2013)
- No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies (2018)
- No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies (2018)
Europe Central won the National Book Award; RURD was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award. An avowed admirer of Japanese writers like Mishima and Kawabata (the former gets many quotes in RURD), Vollmann has written books on the Fukushima disaster and Noh theater. The Book of Dolores chronicles Vollmann’s occasional role as a transwoman; How You Are promises more on this front. Yes, we said fecund. Fecund, diverse, confrontational, all.
Overall, Vollmann’s work evinces a deep suspicion of technology and this, when coupled with an obviously deeply unconventional intellect, led the FBI to consider him a suspect in the Unabomber case. No doubt abetting the FBI’s case was Vollmann’s avowed love of firearms. (He once fired a pistol (with blanks) into the ceiling at a reading in New York, and RURD is replete with references to Vollmann packing heat). Having requested his FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, Vollmann famously wrote of his interaction with law enforcement for Harper’s magazine.
Combining a life of adventure and provocation with humble if slightly peculiar domesticity, Vollmann lives in Sacramento, California. His wife is an oncologist, and the couple has a daughter. (Vollmann’s wife, then only a fiance, makes an appearance near the beginning of RURD). Near his home, Vollmann keeps a large studio where he not only writes but creates art in a number of different media. His photographs are found throughout RURD, as are the occasional drawings (of items like the Sig Sauer pistol to which he sings a paean). His paintings are influenced by Gauguin and Native American art; most of the visual art, according to those who have seen the studio, focuses on sex workers, geishas, and women who Vollmann calls “goddesses.”