John Rechy

John Francisco Rechy (born March 10, 1934) is a Mexican American novelist, essayist, memoirist, dramatist and literary critic. In his novels he has written extensively about homosexual culture in Los Angeles and wider America, among other subject matters, and is among the pioneers of modern LGBT literature. His debut novel City of Night, published in 1963, was a best seller and is widely considered a seminal work among 20th century literature. Drawing on his own background, he has contributed to Chicano literature, notably with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which has been taught in several Chicano literature courses througout the United States.

Biography
Rechy was born March 10, 1934 in El Paso, Texas. He was the youngest of five children born to Guadalupe (née Flores) and Roberto Sixto Rechy. Both of Rechy's parents were born in Mexico, his father was of Scottish lineage.

He earned a B.A. in English from Texas Western College (now University of Texas at El Paso), where he served as editor of the college newspaper. Following graduation from college, Rechy enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was granted early release from the Army to enroll as a graduate student at Columbia University. He applied for admission to a creative writing class taught by novelist Pearl S. Buck by submitting an unpublished novel he had written titled "Pablo!" While his application to Buck's class was not accepted, Rechy was admitted into the writing classes of Hiram Haydn, a senior editor at Random House, at the New School for Social Research.

Literary career
Rechy's first published work, the largely autobiographical novel City of Night, debuted in October 1963. Despite the predominately negative reviews the book received at the time of its publication, City of Night became a international bestseller. It is now widely recognized as a "modern classic" In addition to the dozen novels he written to date, Rechy has contributed numerous essays and literary reviews to various publications including The Nation, the The New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, L. A. Weekly, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Evergreen Review and Saturday Review. Many of these writings were anthologized in his 2004 publication Beneath the Skin. He has written three plays, Tigers Wild (first performed as The Fourth Angel and based on Rechy's novel of that title), Rushes (based on his novel of the same title), and Momma As She Became—Not As She Was, a one-act play.

Rechy was cited, by journalist Amy Harmon, in a 2004 New York Times article that reported about a computer glitch on Amazon.com that suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews. It was revealed that Rechy, among several other authors, had "pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon's highest rating" Amazon consequently stopped accepting anonymous reviews as a result of this finding.

A biography, Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of John Rechy was written by Charles Casillo. A CD-ROM of his life and work was produced by the Annenberg Center of Communications and is titled: Mysteries and Desire:  Searching the Worlds of John Rechy.

Awards, honors and recognition
Rechy is the first novelist to receive PEN-USA-West's Lifetime Achievement Award (1997); he is the recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle (1999) and an NEA fellow. He is a faculty member at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. He is the first recipient of ONE Magazine Culture Hero Award.

Novels

 * City of Night (Grove Press, 1963) ISBN 9781555847258
 * Numbers (Grove Press, 1967) ISBN 9781555847302
 * This Day's Death (Grove Press, 1969)
 * The Vampires (Grove Press, 1971) ISBN 9780394624440
 * The Fourth Angel (Viking, 1972) ISBN 9781555847272
 * Rushes (Grove Press, 1979) ISBN 9781555847319
 * Bodies and Souls (Carroll & Graf, 1983) ISBN 9781555847241
 * Marilyn's Daughter (Carroll & Graf, 1988) ISBN 9780881842722
 * The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez (Arcade, 1991) ISBN 9781555847296
 * Our Lady of Babylon (Arcade, 1996) ISBN 9781559703352
 * The Coming of the Night (Grove Press, 1999) ISBN 9781555847265
 * The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens (Grove Press, 2003) ISBN 9781555847289

Non-fiction

 * The Sexual Outlaw (Grove Press, 1977) ISBN 9780802131638
 * Beneath the Skin (Carroll & Graf, 2004) ISBN 9780786714056
 * About My Life and the Kept Woman (Grove Press, 2008) (memoir) ISBN 9781555848118