Guy Owen

Who was Guy Owen?

Guy Owen was a novelist, poet, editor, critic and teacher.

He was born in Clarkton, Bladen County, North Carolina, and grew up on a tobacco farm. Although his college education was interrupted by three years as an army private in Europe during World War II, he ultimately earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although he never returned there to live, his Depression-era boyhood in the Cape Fear region, spent accompanying his grandfather to auctions and clerking at his father's general store, informed his writing, providing him with a lifetime of material for his fiction and poetry.

In the years between earning his M.A. and his Ph.D., Owen taught briefly at Davidson College and Elon College. During a four-year stint as an associate professor at Stetson University in Florida, he published his first poetry collection, and founded Impetus, the literary magazine which would evolve into the Southern Poetry Review. In 1960, he published his first novel, Season of Fear, a Depression-era story set in a rural community. The story of one man's struggle between religion and sex was critically well received, but its seriousness left Owen ready to write some lighter fiction. The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man follows the comic adventures of an aging confidence man and his young AWOL sidekick in a thinly fictionalized Bladen County. Mordecai Jones and the guitar playing Curley Treadaway were to become two of Owen's favorite characters. The book was made into a movie in 1967 starring George C. Scott and Michael Sarrazin, and the characters reappeared in two more books to "con" the greedy and gullible who only get what they deserve. The 1970 novel Journey for Joedel won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for best work of fiction by a North Carolinian and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.