John Wynne

Who is John Wynne?

John Stewart Wynne is an American author of novels, short stories and poetry, as well as a Grammy-nominated producer of spoken word recordings.

His writing often depicts characters in extremis, outsiders adrift in a conformist landscape, in plots that juxtapose the surreal and naturalistic. He has been hailed as the heir apparent to the tradition of “outsider art” exemplified by Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers and Truman Capote. Wynne’s writing has been praised for its audacious originality, its beautiful imagery, the astute asides and wry observations of his characters, and his highly charged but often darkly comic mise-en-scènes.

Wynne’s first published fiction was the 1978 short story The Sighting, where flying saucers and Bela Lugosi rub up against an archetypal 1950s drive-in while counterpointing the blossoming relationship of two teen-age boys. Gordon Montador in The Body Politic enthused: "There is nothing else quite like it, for no other writer has experimented with gay experience in the context of our adolescence in straight America in such a direct, sensual and imaginative manner." The Sighting was further praised by Hubert Selby Jr.