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Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, former editor, The New York Times Book Review
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Philip Simmons, Ph.D., was just 35 years old in 1993 when he learned that he had ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, a fatal neuromuscular condition that usually kills its victims in two to five years. With two young children and at the start of a promising academic and literary career, he suddenly had to say goodbye. And by learning the art of dying he succeeded, against the odds, in learning the art of living. Already a widely published author of fiction and literary criticism, he now shares his hard-won insights with this book. | |
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"Philip
Simmons is that rare and necessary human being—one with the courage to
see things as they are, for better and worse. He possesses an invaluable
gift: the capacity to take the rest of us where he has been and where he
is going."
Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, former editor, The New York Times Book Review |
| Philip Simmons
was Associate
Professor of English at Lake Forest College in Illinois, where he taught
literature and creative writing for nine years before being disabled by
Lou Gehrig's disease. He was a frequent speaker and workshop leader for
churches and civic groups, and was contributing editor of the UU World,
the journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
He earned his B.A. in English and Physics from Amherst College, his MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis, and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ploughshares, The Massachusetts Review, TriQuarterly, and the Alaska Quarterly Review. His criticism has been published in numerous scholarly journals, and his book, Deep Surfaces, on postmodern American fiction, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 1997. |
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