The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
NOTRE DAME FACULTY, 1981–2015
The tie. William O'Rourke taught English at the University of Notre Dame from 1981 to 2015 and founded its graduate creative writing program — the institution's course stands in Arts, and the program's own tribute history names him the founder, with the poets John Matthias and Sonia Gernes his faculty colleagues of the founding. The tie is a working life of thirty-four years across the river; the shelf is unusually various, and it is the variousness that makes the entry.
The books, from his own vita. The reportage came first: The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972), his account of the Berrigan-era trial, reissued for its fortieth anniversary by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2012. Then the novels: The Meekness of Isaac (Crowell, 1974), Idle Hands (Delacorte, 1981), Criminal Tendencies (E. P. Dutton, 1987), and Notts (Marlowe & Co., 1996) — the last set in an English unemployment office, drawn from a year in England. The anthology he edited, On the Job: Fiction About Work (Random House, 1977). The criticism: Signs of the Literary Times: The View from the Humanities (SUNY Press, 1993). The campaign books, written from a television columnist's couch: Campaign America '96: The View From the Couch (Marlowe & Co., 1997) and Campaign America 2000 (2001). The medical memoir: On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). And the late volumes: the Notre Dame Review's first-decade anthology, co-edited with John Matthias (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer (Indiana University Press, 2012); and Politics and the American Language (Welcome Rain, 2020). Two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships stand behind the shelf. A novelist, a trial reporter, a memoirist and a working journalist of the Chicago Sun-Times column years — the fullest single-faculty shelf of the program he built.
Sources:
- The author's curriculum vitae (University of Notre Dame) — the books with publishers and years, as listed in the text; the 1981 appointment and 2015 emeritus rank; the founding of the graduate program in creative writing.
- University of Notre Dame Press — The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, 40th-anniversary edition (2012), and On Having a Heart Attack (2006); University of Notre Dame, Creative Writing Program — the 2015 tribute booklet naming the founder and his founding colleagues.
- Arts (this record) — the working program's institutional course, 1983–1996.