James Carlos Blake facts for kids

James Carlos Blake (born May 26, 1947) is an American writer of novels, novellas, short stories, and essays. His work has received extensive critical favor and several notable awards. He has been called “one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life” as well as “one of the most original writers in America today and … certainly one of the bravest.” He is a recipient of the University of South Florida's Distinguished Humanities Alumnus Award and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.

Biography

Blake has written about his boyhood in a memoir essay entitled “The Outsider” and has discussed his life and work in a profile in Texas Monthly and in a wide-ranging interview in Firsts. He was born in Tampico, Mexico, a third-generation Mexican descended from American, English, Irish, and Spanish ancestors—including a British pirate who was executed in Veracruz, Mexico—and is a naturalized American citizen. His father, Carlos Sebastian Blake Hernandez, was a civil engineer born and schooled in Mexico City. His mother, Estrella Maria Lozano Cano, was the daughter of a horse rancher and grew up on the family's ranch near Matamoros. Blake received his elementary education at St. Joseph's Academy in Brownsville, Texas and graduated from high school in Miami, Florida. After service in the U. S. Army Airborne (paratroopers), he earned BA and MA degrees at the University of South Florida Tampa Bay and an MFA degree from Bowling Green State University (Ohio), where he attended on a fellowship. He has worked as a snake-catcher, Volkswagen mechanic, swimming pool maintenance man, and county jail properties officer, but his primary occupation has been as a college instructor. He has taught at the University of South Florida, Bowling Green State University, Florida SouthWestern State College, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (Saudi Arabia), and Miami Dade College. In 1997, he left teaching to write full-time.

Works

Although Blake wrote sporadically from his teens until his thirties, it was not until the early 1980s, while again living in Miami, that he began to write with purpose, and over the next few years he published a number of short stories in a variety of literary journals. In 1995 he published his first novel, The Pistoleer, an account of the life and times of the infamous Texas outlaw, John Wesley Hardin. It was a finalist for the 1995 Best Novel of the West award from the Western Writers of America. Despite its “western” setting, it was recognized as a significant literary work presenting not only the story of the title character, but also, through its vast array of narrators, a cultural mosaic of the South in the era of Reconstruction.

In the ten years following the publication of The Pistoleer, Blake published eight more novels and a collection of short works, plus more short stories and two memoir essays. In 1997 his third novel, In the Rogue Blood, gained him considerable attention and won the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.

Cultural significance

Several of Blake's works have been published in foreign editions, and some are under film option, including The Killings of Stanley Ketchel, which has been optioned by Terence Winter, writer and executive producer of The Sopranos and creator of Boardwalk Empire. The Friends of Pancho Villa was going to be turned into a movie by director Emir Kusturica, starring Johnny Depp in the leading role, but Depp pulled out. According to Blake, Kusturica spoke to Benicio del Toro about taking over the role, but the movie ultimately did not happen.

Awards

• 1991 Quarterly West Novella Prize for “I, Fierro”
• 1993 Authors in the Park National Short Story Competition Award for “Under the Sierras”
• 1997 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction for In the Rogue Blood
• 1999 Southwest Book Award (Border Regional Library Association) for Borderlands
• 1999 Chautauqua South Book Award for Red Grass River
• 2005 Japan Adventure Fiction Association Prize for A World of Thieves
• 2007 Maltese Falcon Award (Maltese Falcon Society of Japan) for Under the Skin
• 2013 French Grand Prix du Roman Noir Étranger for Red Grass River
• 2020 French Prix de Beaune for Best Foreign Novel for Handsome Harry

Other recognition

• 1995 Finalist, Best Novel of the West (Western Writers of America): The Pistoleer
• 2004 "Best Books of 2004": Entertainment Weekly: Handsome Harry
• 2013 Finalist, Best Western Long Novel (Western Writers of America): Country of the Bad Wolfes
• 2013 Southwest Books of the Year (Pima County Public Library): The Rules of Wolfe
• 2013 "Best Books for Men 2013," Men's Journal: The Rules of Wolfe
• 2013 "Year's Best Crime Novels," Booklist: The Rules of Wolfe
• 2013 "Best Novels of the Year," Deadly Pleasures: The Rules of Wolfe
• 2014 "The 101 Best Crime Novels of the Past Decade," Booklist: The Rules of Wolfe
• 2015 Shortlisted for CWA Gold Dagger Award (UK): The Rules of Wolfe
• 2018 "Top Ten Books About Gangsters," The Guardian (UK): The Rules of Wolfe