Just a few years in the past, the novelist and short-story author Lauren Groff reflected on what had launched one of many extra glowing literary careers of current years:
When C. Michael Curtis pulled my quick story “L. DeBard and Aliette” from the slush pile in 2005, I used to be in my first semester in graduate college at Madison. In the years since I’d graduated from faculty, I’d been a bartender and administrative assistant and had labored my mind and fingers uncooked, attempting and largely failing to jot down effectively by myself. In that point, I completed three and a half apprentice novels and numerous quick tales, none of which was superb. Finally, with the story that The Atlantic took, I had finally written a narrative that was not solely adequate however adequate for Curtis’s sharp eye and exacting requirements.
Groff went on: “My entire life as a writer unfolded from that moment of acceptance from C. Michael Curtis and The Atlantic, and the sheer luck of that snip in time feels holy to me.”
Mike Curtis, who died final week on the age of 88, was a member of The Atlantic’s workers for 57 years. The American literary empyrean is thickly populated with writers Mike found or nurtured. For good purpose: Over his lengthy profession as an Atlantic editor—and as a trainer of writing at Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Tufts, Boston University, Bennington College, and, most lately, Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the place he co-occupied the John C. Cobb Chair within the Humanities along with his spouse, the novelist Betsy Cox—Mike was a tireless champion of quick fiction who beloved nothing greater than discovering new expertise. “The best part of my job,” he as soon as stated, “is turning over all those rocks and finding a silver dollar now and then.”
During his lengthy tenure at The Atlantic, Mike turned over a number of rocks, and located a number of silver {dollars}. Among the writers whose work that Mike was the primary, or among the many first, to find and publish in a nationwide journal had been Charles Baxter, Ann Beattie, Ethan Canin, Louise Erdrich, Rebecca Lee, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jay McInerny, James Alan McPherson, Tim O’Brien, John Sayles, Akhil Sharma, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Tobias Wolff. Mike additionally labored with loads of established masters: A. S. Byatt and Saul Bellow, Raymond Carver and Cynthia Ozick, Alice Munro and Richard Ford, John Updike and Philip Roth, Richard Yates and Paul Theroux and Walter Mosley, Barth and Barthelme and Borges, and lots of, many others.
In 2002, Nic Pizzolatto, then a scholar within the M.F.A. program on the University of Arkansas, submitted two tales to The Atlantic. He got here residence sooner or later to discover a message on his voicemail—it was Mike Curtis saying that he preferred the tales and was accepting them for publication. “I think at first I thought it was one of my friends, being an asshole,” Pizzolatto recalled. But the journal printed “Ghost-Birds” within the October 2003 concern and “Between Here and the Yellow Sea” in November 2004, and Pizzolatto launched into a profitable profession as a novelist and tv author, ultimately creating and writing the acclaimed True Detective collection for HBO.
Ann Beattie lately described the position Mike performed in her profession:
When I first began to jot down fiction within the early 70s, the identify C. Michael Curtis was interchangeable with Shining Star. He was one: somebody to look as much as due to his skill to identify rising expertise; an esteemed editor amongst editors; a person who formed style and adopted by means of with writers, encouraging them in vital (and in addition considerate) methods. He actually beloved quick tales, and he was liable for serving to alongside—actually, for figuring out—the early careers of many younger writers, in a style that, pre-mass-MFA, had been faltering. I knew him as an individual decided to re-energize the modern American quick story—a dedication that was indispensable to its resurgence. He was such an astute reader, and, in his interactions with writers, a listener. Watchful. Helpful and type. He simply assumed that studying and writing had been necessary, important pursuits, and that it was his position to encourage issues alongside, spreading the great phrase. In many senses, he was a real believer.
One of the primary individuals Mike introduced into The Atlantic after arriving on the journal was a writing scholar at Syracuse University who, within the early Nineteen Sixties, was contributing violent, bloody, sex-and-booze-saturated tales to quite a lot of university-affiliated publications. Mike pictured the author, who glided by “J. C. Oates,” as “a scruffy garage mechanic with a sour view of humanity, someone I wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night.” But he admired the writing and accepted one among Oates’s submissions, contingent on the creator permitting Mike to chop the story by one-third. “In the Region of Ice,” whose creator had dropped the initials and was now going by Joyce Carol Oates, was printed in The Atlantic in August 1966, and was deemed the perfect story of the 12 months by the O. Henry Collection, then essentially the most prestigious garland in brief fiction. In the following a long time, Mike printed many tales by Oates, now some of the influential voices in American fiction and herself a devoted trainer.
Across six a long time, Mike and his workforce of interns and editorial assistants sifted by means of 1000’s of tales every month. His correspondence was immense and endless, scrawled within the white house of the letters he obtained in a good, practically indecipherable hand. As Jane Rosenzweig, now the director of the writing heart at Harvard, remembered:
When I began working as Mike’s assistant, in 1994, his first praise was about how briskly I might kind (on the electrical typewriter in my workplace)—not as a result of he didn’t worth my studying and critiquing expertise, however as a result of my typing velocity allowed me to maintain up with the big variety of letters he wrote to authors who submitted their quick tales to the journal. Mike learn the whole lot with the identical consideration and curiosity—tales submitted by literary brokers, tales despatched on to him by authors, tales pulled from the “slush” pile by interns. His private replies to authors had been legendary; I nonetheless meet writers who can quote verbatim what he stated to them 25 years in the past, each the reward and the criticism. He might have thought the story was “too long for what it accomplishes,” or “small,” or “engaging, but not for us,” however he inspired these writers to attempt once more, and lots of did—for many years. The letters had been normally temporary—only a sentence or two—however sufficient to remind an aspiring author that somebody was on the market, ready for his or her subsequent story.
Tobias Wolff recalled Mike’s shrewd relentlessness in a job that required each judgment and endurance:
How many manuscripts got here pouring by means of Mike’s mail slot each day? In the course of every week? A month? Hundreds, for positive. Yet each time I spoke to Mike about writing, nearly all the time on the telephone, throughout modifying classes (we met solely twice, and briefly), he warmed to the topic with the freshness of youth. And he introduced that very same freshness to our modifying classes. In fact, I couldn’t put on the person down, exhausting as I typically tried, in my protection of a phrase or phrase or passage that I believed indispensable to my story, and that Mike didn’t. He wasn’t all the time proper, however he was proper more often than not.
Mike’s path to changing into an influential determine in American fiction was removed from foreordained. He was certainly exhausting to put on down. Born in 1934, he skilled a Dickensian early childhood—a tumultuous and disrupted household life; stints in foster houses; boarding college beginning at age 4; and high-school classmates who beat him up, at an Arkansas college from which just about nobody went on to school and the place he performed on a basketball workforce that by no means received. Ralph Lombreglia, one of many writers Mike labored with for many years, recalled getting a uncommon glimpse into Mike’s previous:
I first met Mike within the mid-Seventies after I wrote to ask his recommendation about changing into a fiction author. He invited me to the Atlantic workplaces the place I arrived in a swimsuit, tie, and London Fog raincoat with epaulets on the shoulders. I’ll all the time be grateful to him for not remembering that assembly. Later, each time he purchased one among my quick tales, we had lunch collectively on Newbury Street, concluding along with his favourite dessert, chocolate-covered ice cream bonbons. One of these lunches was significantly memorable. The story he was publishing involved a girl raised in an orphanage regardless of having had two residing mother and father. “You know,” he stated, “your story is remarkably similar to my own life,” and went on to inform me that he was the illegitimate son of the outstanding architect Ely Kahn. Mike’s mom had had a passing affair with him within the Thirties, however she “didn’t want a son around,” as he put it, and so he was deserted to numerous boarding faculties and foster houses. For years he’d identified his father’s id however by no means revealed it, even when he first met members of the person’s household. I advised Mike that my very own mom’s life was the premise of that story, and that I supposed to increase it right into a novel sometime. My final letter from Mike, in 2018, started, “Finished your novel, all 576 pages of it.” His unsurprising recommendation was to chop it by half and ship it again to him. I’m nonetheless in the course of that rewrite. I assumed that Mike could be round without end.
From his inauspicious Arkansas highschool, Mike ultimately escaped to Cornell’s School of Hotel Management, in 1952. Browsing within the college library, he found the works of Franz Kafka. No extra lodge administration—he wished to switch to the liberal-arts faculty and turn out to be a literature main. He needed to apply a number of instances earlier than directors realized he was severe sufficient to confess. Soon, he was modifying the literary journal and dealing for the newspaper and rooming with an engineering main and aspiring author named Thomas Pynchon. His different roommate was the folks singer and novelist Richard Fariña, who would go on to jot down the 1966 cult traditional Been Down So Long It Looks Up to Me. (Fariña would later marry Joan Baez’s sister Mimi; Pynchon served as greatest man.)
After commencement, in 1956, Mike briefly labored on the Ithaca Journal and at Newsweek earlier than returning to Cornell for a doctorate in political science. He was not sure whether or not he ought to pursue a profession on the CIA or as a journalist. But he stored his hand in literature, writing fiction for campus literary magazines and composing poems, one among which received an American Academy of Poets Prize. In 1961, when Peter Davison, The Atlantic’s longtime poetry editor, got here to Cornell with Anne Sexton to do a studying, Mike pressed some poems into his palms. Davison ended up accepting three of them for publication. He additionally supplied Mike a summer time job studying the fiction slush pile. This led to a telephone name within the spring of 1963 from the journal’s prime editor, Edward Weeks, asking if Mike would come to Boston and take a job as a junior editor. Mike was about to take his complete exams en path to securing his Ph.D. But, as he recalled in a 1984 interview with The Missouri Review, “I had been in grad school for four years and my wife was about to have a baby and I’d been in Ithaca for twelve years and it was time to leave. So I said yes, took a leave of absence from grad school, and came to The Atlantic.” That go away of absence by no means ended. “In those days The Atlantic had no masthead and we really didn’t have titles in any formal way. I came as an assistant to the editor. I was there for five weeks before I ever saw Mr. Weeks. In fact, I feared he might not even know I was there.” An older editor, Charles Morton, took Mike underneath his wing, and he quickly developed a portfolio modifying each fiction and nonfiction, particularly items on sports activities, faith, and the social sciences.
In 1966, Weeks was succeeded as editor in chief by Robert Manning. In his memoir, The Swamp Root Chronicle, Manning recorded that among the many editors he inherited was “a young Cornellian named C. Michael Curtis [who] had a sharp ear and a clear eye for promising new short story writers as well as a good grip on the many social issues with which the magazine concerned itself. Mike was a shy and complicated fellow whom the vicissitudes of childhood had afflicted with a stutter that magically disappeared when he taught creative writing at nearby colleges … or when he held a good hand at the poker table.”
In time left over after modifying, instructing, and household, Mike utilized himself to pickup basketball. He performed at YMCAs and writers’ conferences everywhere in the nation. He wasn’t tall, and after age 50 he wore rec specs and a cumbersome knee brace that he used as a weapon when posting up within the paint. But he was an ardent competitor—nickname: “Bear”—who might rating layups over taller defenders utilizing artful spin and whose passing was crisp and inventive; unalert teammates had been liable to take a tough no-look go to the nostril or the again of the cranium. He refused to let advancing infirmity hold him off the courtroom, enjoying repeatedly deep into his 80s. The author Ethan Canin remembered these video games:
He just about gave me my begin as a author, selecting me out of a slush pile that solely an individual like him would have bothered to learn, not to mention rigorously. And then for the subsequent thirty years preventing the great battle, all the time pushing literary fiction, all the time pushing younger writers. But what I keep in mind most about Mike was the way in which he performed basketball. Rumor had it that in his prime he’d been a Golden Gloves boxer, and he actually performed that approach. He confirmed up on the courtroom with a chunk of {hardware} round his knee that regarded just like the spurs from a Roman chariot. And it seems he was in basketball as he was in life—all the time pushing, all the time pushing.
Mike possessed each stoicism and a sly wit. The wit emerged from what appeared, deceptively, to be a placid and dry demeanor, and it made itself identified like an ambush in his letters and lectures. A mischievous tone typically took on an edge. For years, a letter Mike wrote in 1989 held on the partitions of The Atlantic’s workplaces. A pissed off aspiring contributor who had had his submissions rejected many instances had written in to say that he’d heard rumors that the journal used 5 totally different types of rejection letters for various conditions. Mike responded:
The persistent rumors are fairly true, although modest of their evaluation of our protocols. We have, actually, many greater than 5 totally different sorts of rejection slips. One slip, for instance, is shipped in response to all tales about family pets. Another is used to reject tales about troubled tutorial {couples} touring in Europe (nonetheless additional distinction is made between tales during which the warring couple is restored of their affection for one another by the spectacle of alien hearts at play and tales during which the extra justifiably aggrieved of the pair comes finally to his/her senses and cuts quick what guarantees to turn out to be a dangerous drift into self-degradation).
Other slips are used for warfare tales, for tales about adolescents involving faculty (or highschool) friends who lastly understand the reality of their relationships, or any story during which one character is a fish. We have a particular inventory and ink for tales about youngsters who’ve been deserted or abused by one or each mother and father, and for whom the reminiscence has turn out to be significantly acute because the youngster, now an grownup, displays upon the neediness of his/her personal youngster/youngsters. Still different rejection slips are earmarked for tales which make use of anthropomorphism, ladies who out of the blue develop male sexual traits, or vehicles that speak again.
We have rejection slips for retired professionals, for kids underneath the age of 14, for writers who maintain political workplace, and for teachers who’ve been advised by associates they should submit manuscripts to The Atlantic.
We have rejection slips for tales despatched concurrently to a couple of journal, for writers who use just one identify (normally a vegetable or mineral), for fiction manuscripts despatched as proof that anybody can do higher than the creator of a current Atlantic story, and for writers who say they may renew their subscriptions to this journal provided that we’ll publish their fiction.
We even have a particular rejection letter for writers who’re extra wedded to the chances of language than to the niceties of convincing narrative. That is the letter you might be studying at this second.
When The Atlantic was primarily based in Boston, Mike and his household would host energetic annual softball video games and picnics at their residence in Concord after which in Littleton, Massachusetts, the place youngsters of workers would play alongside the sheep he stored in the summertime, in lieu of getting to mow the garden. Inevitably a basketball sport would additionally get away on the hoop on the storage or throughout the road. Those had been household events, and kids had been by no means shy round Mike. Tobias Wolff remembers:
One day my spouse heard my then-5-year-old son, Michael, speaking to somebody upstairs, but she knew he was alone up there. She discovered him with the phone in his hand, gabbing away. It was Mike on the opposite finish. He’d referred to as to debate a narrative, however was completely satisfied to speak to my boy as an alternative. He was laughing after I took possession of the telephone. Well, why not? It was certainly extra enjoyable than listening to me plant my flag on some useless adjective.
Decades of studying greater than 10,000 quick tales a 12 months in the hunt for the dozen or in order that The Atlantic might really publish that 12 months infused Mike with a deep perception within the significance of fiction to tradition, and a sort of impish knowledge concerning the writing life.
On dealing with disappointing information from editors: “Take your rejection slips and cover a wall with them. I did that when I was in college. I became fascinated by the different paper colors and typefaces and probably sent work to magazines I otherwise wouldn’t have, except that I wanted to get copies of their rejection slips.”
On what a brief story can accomplish: “The value of short fiction lies, perhaps, in its capacity to ignite uncertainty and mindfulness into our lives, as well as to remind us of the perceptiveness and artfulness of the storytellers among us.”
Mike leaves behind six anthologies of quick fiction, together with Contemporary New England Stories (1992), Contemporary West Coast Stories (1993), God: Stories (1998), and Faith: Stories (2003); 5 Atlantic National Magazine Awards for fiction, together with many extra finalist nominations; and the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, which awards $5,000 and publication to a debut e book of quick fiction by writers residing within the South.
He is survived by his spouse, the novelist and poet Betsy Cox; his brothers, Ben Curtis and Andrew Curtis; his son Hans Curtis; his daughter, Hilary Curtis Osmer; his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Morrow; his stepson, Michael Cox; and 5 grandchildren—D. J. Osmer, Jack Morrow, Nate Morrow, Caroline Cox, and Andrew Cox. His oldest son, Christopher Curtis, died in 2013. He can be survived by tons of of writers whose careers he launched or nurtured; by the 1000’s extra whose work he gave the respect of great consideration; and by a republic of letters enriched by his having contributed to it with such dedication for therefore lengthy.