Curriculum Vitae

SAUNDERS, Jack L(ee) Jr. 1939-

PERSONAL:

Born August 31, 1939, in West Palm Beach, FL; son of Jack and Edna Lee (a housewife: maiden name, Nordhem) Saunders; married Brenda Brown August 29, 1968; sons Owen, a fiddle player in a bluegrass band, and Balder, a student at Georgia Tech on the GI Bill (ex-Marine). Education: Florida State University, B.S., anthropology, 1968. Graduate work (four years) in anthropology at FSU and Tulane University. Politics: None. Religion: None. Hobbies: None—like Henry Chinaski, in Barfly.

ADDRESSES:

Home: Garage Band Books, P. O. Box 10501, Panama City, FL 32404. Email: jacksaunders@bellsouth.net

CAREER:

Usual assortment of dreary jobs as laborer and clerk. Technical writer for last 25 years. Highest position held: senior information development specialist. Currently: retired.

MEMBER:

Phi Beta Kappa, Society for Technical Communication, Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers, National Writers Union, HTML Writers Guild, Jazz Journalists Association, Roots Music Association, Underground Literary Alliance (ULA)

AWARDS AND HONORS:

Good Conduct Medal, one Oak Leaf Cluster, USAF. B.S., magna cum laude, FSU, 1968. Outstanding Senior. University Fellow, anthropology, FSU, 1969. NDEA Fellow, anthropology, Tulane University, 1970-72.

PROFESSIONAL MILESTONES:

WRITINGS (ENEMA VÉRITÉ, OR CRANK-LETTRES):

WORK IN PROGRESS:

SENIOR INFORMATION DEVELOPMENT SPECIALIST

SIDELIGHTS:

Jack Saunders has been writing for 35 years, without selling a word to New York or Hollywood, winning a grant, a writer-in-residence position, or a literary prize. He is working on a 40-year roman-feuilleton, or saga-novel, that is too large for small presses to publish and too outspoken, freewheeling, and vulgar for the mainstream commercial houses. A vernacular writer, he calls himself. In the sense self-taught. But also in the sense ambassador-in-bonds. He shoots his leaflets into the void and presses on to Boulogne, like Tristram Shandy. His stack now stands at 316 volumes, 317 roaring in his veins like a camphor injection. The stopped-up toilet of American letters, fixing to erupt, like the Wakulla Volcano, or an explosion in a charnel house. He calls his coterie of steadfast readers the Buzzard Cult, after the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a revitalization movement that swept the Lower Mississippi Valley just before and after European contact, and calls himself the salvage archeologist of the Mall Builder culture. America’s greatest living unpublished, or underpublished writer, perhaps the greatest unpublished, or underpublished American writer ever.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

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