Fielding Dawson attended the famed Black Mountain College from 1949 to 1952, before settling in New York City where he became part of the Beat scene. Dawson is admired for his stream-of-consciousness style fiction with minimal punctuation, lax grammar, and naturalistic dialogue. Dawson wrote twenty-two books of short stories and memoirs, as well as a history of the Black Mountain College movement.
“Dawson’s ear for speech is impeccable, but more startling is the way speech… is connected to thought, and how thought itself is formed in a seamless way in the author’s prose… [his] prose is complex, driven and quick, and the reader constantly feels he is encountering the ruminations of the mind in ways he has never experienced before.” —New York Times Book Review
“No writer moves more aptly, quickly, closely, in the tracking of human dimensions of feeling and relation.” —Robert Creeley