{"id":16237,"date":"2016-08-10T19:14:07","date_gmt":"2016-08-10T19:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lichen.csd.sc.edu\/sce\/entries\/lott-bret\/"},"modified":"2022-08-09T18:54:34","modified_gmt":"2022-08-09T18:54:34","slug":"lott-bret","status":"publish","type":"entry","link":"https:\/\/www.scencyclopedia.org\/sce\/entries\/lott-bret\/","title":{"rendered":"Lott, Bret"},"content":{"rendered":"

Novelist, short story writer, memoirist, educator. Although Lott himself was born in Los Angeles, California, on October 8, 1948, his parents, William Sequoia Lott and Barbara Joan Holmes, were southerners by lineage. Lott earned a B.A. in English from California State University-Long Beach in 1981. His matriculation was interrupted, however, by a decision to enter the workforce in 1979\u20131980 as a salesman for RC Cola, a temporary experience that was to hold him in good stead when he wrote his first novel The Man Who Owned Vermont <\/em>(1987), which recounts the tale of a route salesman for a soft drink company who comes to grips with his personal shortcomings in time to save his shattered marriage.<\/p>\n

It was in his senior year as an undergraduate that Lott decided to become a writer, and initially he tried his hand at journalism, working for the Commercial News <\/em>in Los Angeles (1980\u20131981). After graduation, however, he came east to pursue an M.F.A. in creative writing (1984) at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he studied with the celebrated American novelist James Baldwin.<\/p>\n

After a couple of years of teaching at the Ohio State University\u2013it was during this period that he won an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship\u2013he arrived in South Carolina to take up a position as both a writer-in-residence and professor at the College of Charleston, where he has remained to this date except for a three-year-period (2004\u20132007) when he was affiliated with Louisiana State University as editor of The Southern Review.<\/em><\/p>\n

In addition to The Man Who Owned Vermont, <\/em>his early works include three novels, A Stranger\u2019s House <\/em>(1988), Jewel <\/em>(1991), and Reed\u2019s Beach <\/em>(1991), and two short story collections, A Dream of Old Leaves <\/em>(1989) and How to Get Home <\/em>(1996).<\/p>\n

By 1999 these works had earned Lott an enviable reputation for empathetic characterization and lyrical prose, but his career reached a much higher plateau of critical attention and commercial success when television host Oprah Winfrey selected his novel Jewel <\/em>for her incredibly influential on-air book club. The novel, first published in 1991, was hastily reprinted due to Winfrey\u2019s endorsement and became an overnight bestseller; in 2001, it was made into a television movie, directed by Paul Shapiro and starring Farrah Fawcett in the title role.<\/p>\n

In this career-making novel, the protagonist and first-person narrator Jewel Hilburn decides to uproot her entire family in the 1940s to find the enlightened medical support that she needs for her youngest offspring, a daughter named Brenda Kay, who is diagnosed with Down Syndrome. The essential plot of the book is based loosely on the real-life story of the author\u2019s grandmother, who packed up her six children and moved from Mississippi to California in order to get for her youngest child the help that the \u201ccracker doctors\u201d of her native state could not provide.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Lott is a writer about families. In an interview with Robert Hall, he asserted, \u201cWhether you are writing away from the family or trying to extract from the family or trying to get hold of the family, or the family\u2019s dying or being born, or you are meeting your soul mate or your lover or whatever; it\u2019s all about family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most often Lott\u2019s fictional families are in crisis, coping with the sadness resulting from some loss; in Reed\u2019s Beach, <\/em>a couple must re-navigate their marriage after the death of their seven-year-old son; in A Song I Knew by Heart <\/em>(2004), a widow, whose grief is compounded after her son is killed in a car accident, must offer a path forward for her equally devastated daughter-in-law.<\/p>\n

A departure from his customary family-centered narratives are the two books to date featuring the character Huger Dillard, whom readers first meet as a fifteen-year-old boy in The Hunt Club <\/em>(1998) and then as a twenty-seven-year-old college dropout in Dead Low Tide <\/em>(2012). Although both works contain the author\u2019s distinctive attention to characterization and concrete setting\u2013in this case, both the sharp class divisions of Charleston society and the lush landscape of the Carolina lowcountry\u2013they are also mysteries during which the male protagonist solves a crime and simultaneously takes yet another step toward autonomous adulthood.<\/p>\n

Because of their dramatic twists and turns, both books stand out from the rest of Lott\u2019s canon, which is composed chiefly of narratives focused on the ordinariness of most people\u2019s lives\u2013the familiar everyday challenges that most individuals face, particularly in their relationships with others.<\/p>\n

In addition to his fiction writing and editorial work, Lott has experimented with the genre of personal narrative. Three generations of Lott males provide the subject matter for Fathers, Sons and Brothers <\/em>(2000), the first of three personal memoirs. The other two, Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer\u2019s Life <\/em>(2005) and Letters and Life: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian <\/em>(2013), draw upon his years as both a professional writer and a teacher.<\/p>\n

Among the various prizes that Lott has won over the years are three Syndicated Fiction Project Awards from PEN\/NEA and a South Carolina Arts Commission Fellowship in Literature. He lives with his wife Melanie in Hanahan, South Carolina; they have two children.<\/p>\n

\u201cLott, Bret.\u201d Contemporary Southern Writers. <\/em>Edited by Robert Matuz. Detroit: St. James Press, 1999.<\/p>\n

Marbura, Lily. \u201cInterview with Bret Lott.\u201d Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts <\/em>8 (2009): 157\u2013165.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Novelist, short story writer, memoirist, educator. Although Lott himself was born in Los Angeles, California, on October 8, 1948, his parents, William Sequoia Lott and Barbara Joan Holmes, were southerners by lineage. Lott earned a B.A. in English from California State University-Long Beach in 1981. His matriculation was interrupted, however, by a decision to enter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":-1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","class_list":["post-16237","entry","type-entry","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","ecms-a-z","ecms-charleston-county","ecms-civil-rights-era-1955-1969","ecms-encyclopedia","ecms-l","ecms-literature","ecms-lowcountry","ecms-post-war-america-1946-1954","ecms-the-modern-state-1970-present"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLott, Bret - South Carolina Encyclopedia<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.scencyclopedia.org\/sce\/entries\/lott-bret\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lott, Bret - South Carolina Encyclopedia\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Novelist, short story writer, memoirist, educator. 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