Andre Dubus

Andre Dubus married Patricia Lowe in 1958 and had four children with her. One of the couple’s children, Andre Dubus III also became an acclaimed author. The couple divorced in 1970.

He married Tommie Gale Cotter in 1975. This marriage was short-lived and ended in divorce in 1977.

He tied the knot with Peggy Rambach in 1979. This marriage produced two daughters.

He was born as Andre Jules Dubus II on August 11, 1936 in Lake Charles, Louisiana to Katherine and André Jules Dubus. He had two elder siblings. His family was Catholic and he was raised to be religious.

He attended The Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a Roman Catholic religious order. He loved writing from a young age and his teachers encouraged him to follow his passion.

After high school he went to the McNeese State College from where he graduated in 1958 as a journalism and English major.

Andre Dubus enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps upon his graduation and served there for six years, eventually rising to the rank of captain. In 1964, he quit the Marine Corps and moved to Iowa where he enrolled in the University of Iowa's Iowa Writers' Workshop.

The workshop had the reputation of producing a number of distinguished American writers like Flannery O'Connor and Wallace Stegner. Here he had the good fortune of having Richard Yates as his principal instructor, who like Dubus himself admired the works of Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, and John Cheever. He received his MFA degree in creative writing in1966.

He then accepted a job teaching creative writing and literature at Bradford Junior College in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He remained there for 18 years, until 1984.

Andre Dubus had started writing his first novel while still at the Writer’s Workshop, and published ‘The Lieutenant’ in 1967. The novel, which would be the only one he ever wrote, was based on his military experiences. It received good reviews but was not much successful commercially.

He eventually turned his attention to short stories and over the next few years gained a reputation as one of the major writers in the genre. Over the next few years he produced several collections of short stories including ‘Separate Flights’ (1975),’ Adultery and Other Choices’ (1977),’ Finding a Girl in America’ (1980), ‘The Times Are Never So Bad’ (1983), and ‘Voices from the Moon’ (1984).

His collection of stories, ‘Dancing After Hours’ is considered to be among his finest works. Many of the stories deal with men suffering from physical impairment, and the title story tells the tale of a quadriplegic who acquires a renewed sense of self-confidence following the accident which left him impaired.