John Casey, Novelist of Salty, Rough-Hewn Characters, Dies at 86

New York Times

03-03-2025

John Casey, a writer of lyric yet taut prose in novels, essays and short stories who won the National Book Award in 1989 for 'Spartina,' the story of a rough-hewn fisherman that reviewers called the best American story of nautical life since Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea,' died on Feb. 22 at his home in Charlottesville, Va. He was 86.
His daughters Clare and Julie Casey said the cause was complications of dementia.
Mr. Casey, who spent most of his literary career as a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, was best known for his pinpoint renderings of blue-collar characters, like Dick Pierce, the Rhode Island boatman at the center of 'Spartina,' whom the author referred to as a 'swamp Yankee.'
The novel revolves around both Pierce's romantic entanglements — long married, he starts an affair and gets his lover pregnant — and his struggles to build a boat. Spartina, a sea grass, becomes the unifying metaphor of the book.
'Only the spartinas thrived in the salt flood, shut themselves against the salt but drank the water,' Mr. Casey wrote. 'Smart grass. If he ever got his big boat built he might just call her Spartina, though he ought to call her after his wife.' Mr. Casey won a National Book Award in 1989 for his novel 'Spartina' about a married fisherman and his romantic entanglements. Credit... Alfred A. Knopf, New York
The novelist Susan Kenney, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called the novel 'splendidly conceived, flawlessly rendered and totally absorbing.'
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