James Morrow's Page

My URL

http://jamesmorrow.net/

About Me

James Morrow has been called “Christianity’s Salman Rushdie” by the Denver Post. Born in 1947, this uncategorizable novelist has spent most of his adult life writing satiric fiction that dissects the received theological wisdom of his day — and of days gone by.

Thus far Morrow’s best known literary effort is The Last Witchfinder, praised by Free Inquiry magazine as a “multi-tiered, magisterial, yet cogently designed novel.” This offbeat historical epic tells of Jennet Stearne, who makes it her life’s mission to bring down the 1604 Parliamentary Witchcraft Act. He followed it with a thematic sequel, The Philosopher’s Apprentice, in which a woman with an overactive conscience fights against “Corporate Christi,” the West’s cheerful embrace of feel-good theocracy.

Throughout the 1990’s the author’s principal accomplishment was killing the Supreme Being, an endeavor he pursued through three darkly comic novels known collectively as The Godhead Trilogy. Towing Jehovah, winner of the World Fantasy Award, tells of a supertanker captain’s attempt to bury the two-mile-long corpse of God. In Blameless in Abaddon, a New York Times Notable Book, a Pennsylvania magistrate puts God on trial for crimes against humanity. The Eternal Footman chronicles the “plague of death awareness” that descends on humankind after God’s skull goes into geosynchronous orbit above Times Square.

Morrow’s other novels include the World Fantasy Award-winning Only Begotten Daughter, the Nebula Award-winning City of Truth, This Is the Way the World Ends, and, most recently, Shambling Towards Hiroshima. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife Kathy, son Chris, and two adopted dogs. His favorite quotation comes from the British philosopher Galen Strawson: “It is tempting to conclude that if [God] exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously."

Profession

novelist

Age Group

60+

City and State (For Member Searching)

State College, PA

Country (For Member Searching)

United States of America