Old Friends

Stephen Dixon was a hyper-realistic author of novels and short stories. Working on a portable typewriter, he published 18 novels and about 600 stories.Mr. Dixon played with syntax and diction and used narrative tricks that made his fiction compelling and challenging. In his very short short story Wife in Reverse, Mr. Dixon started with a woman¿s death and ended years earlier, when she meets her husband.

Mr. Dixon started teaching at the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 1980 and stayed until he retired in 2007. Porochista Khakpour, a novelist and memoirist, said Mr. Dixon had been the reason she studied at Hopkins. Dixon¿s honors include several O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment of the Arts grants. He was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1991, for Frog, and in 1995, for Interstate.

Stephen Bruce Ditchik was born on June 6, 1936, in Manhattan, the fifth of seven children. His father, Abraham, was a dentist; his mother, Florence (Leder) Ditchik, was a chorus girl and beauty queen and later an interior designer. His mother changed their last name to Dixon after her husband went to prison for extortion.

After graduation Dixon moved to Washington, where he worked for pulp crime magazines and as a radio reporter. Later, back in Manhattan, he was an editor at CBS News. But after starting to write short stories he knew he found his calling. He wrote for major magazines like Esquire and Playboy and for literary reviews and journals, none of them too obscure for him to send pitches to.

Stephen Dixon passed away on 11/06/2019 at the age of 83.

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