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James Wilcox is an American novelist and a professor at LSU in Baton Rouge. James Wilcox worked at Random House and Doubleday in New York after graduating from Yale. Wilcox was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986.
Wilcox is the author of nine comic novels mostly set in, or featuring characters from, the fictional town of Tula Springs, Louisiana. Wilcox's first book Modern Baptists remains his best known work.
About his first novel, Modern Baptists, Robert Penn Warren commented, “...James Wilcox has made a tale that is realistic and fantastic, painfully comic, and, in a strange way, psychologically penetrating….There is no writer exactly like him. He is an original.†On the front page of The New York Times Book Review Anne Tyler wrote, “Every reviewer, no doubt, has methods for marking choice passages in a book. Mine is a system of colored paper clips; yellow means funny. Modern Baptists should be thick with yellow clips on every page, but it does even better than that. While I was reading it, I laughed so hard I kept forgetting my paper clips. Mr. Wilcox has real comic genius. He is a writer to make us all feel hopeful.†Walker Percy called this same novel, “a beauty.†Since its publication in 1983 Modern Baptists has been included in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon and listed in GQ’s 45th anniversary issue as one of the best works of fiction published in the past 45 years. In 1998 in U.S. News & World Report Toni Morrison counted Modern Baptists among her three “favorite works by unsung writers.†In 2005 Modern Baptists was reissued in Great Britain in a Penguin Modern Classics edition with an introduction by the novelist Jim Crace.
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