A short life of the author
James McConkey (17 November 1921 – 16 March 2017) was an American essayist, memoirist, and literary critic who spent his entire academic career at Cornell University and whose lyrical, meditative prose — deeply attentive to memory, landscape, animals, and the passage of time — made him one of the finest and most quietly influential American essayists of the second half of the twentieth century. His work is known to relatively few readers, but those who know it tend to regard it with something approaching devotion.
Life
McConkey was born in Lakewood, Ohio, and grew up in the rural Midwest. He served in the Army during World War II, attended Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve), and earned his M.A. at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 1956, he joined the English department at Cornell University, where he taught creative writing and literature for forty years, retiring as the Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus.
He lived in Trumansburg, New York, near Cayuga Lake, and the Finger Lakes landscape — its farmland, its gorges, its weather — became central to his literary imagination. He was married to the artist Gladys McConkey.
The Novels of E.M. Forster (1957)
McConkey’s first book was a critical study of E. M. Forster, published at a time when Forster’s reputation was at its zenith but sustained critical attention to his novels was still relatively scarce. The book examines all five of Forster’s novels, with particular attention to the tension between connection and isolation, and to the symbolic structures that give the novels their resonance. It was widely reviewed and established McConkey as a serious literary scholar.
The Essays and Memoirs
McConkey’s essential achievement is in the personal essay. Court of Memory (1983) — his masterpiece — is a collection of interconnected essays that move between childhood memories, the Cornell landscape, reflections on literature (Chekhov, Forster, Thoreau), and meditations on the nature of memory itself. The prose is lucid, unhurried, and deeply attentive — McConkey writes about a walk through an autumn field or a conversation with a neighbour with the same care and precision that other writers reserve for dramatic events.
Crossroads: A Memoir of a Lost Village (1968) is an earlier memoir about a rural community in upstate New York. Rowan Tree is a novel-memoir hybrid about family, landscape, and loss. Stories from My Life with the Other Animals (2005) collects essays about the animals — horses, dogs, cats, birds — that shared McConkey’s rural life, and is written with a tenderness and specificity that reflects decades of attentive cohabitation.
McConkey also edited The Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology (1996), a collection of writings about memory by authors from Augustine to Nabokov, which reflects his lifelong preoccupation with how memory shapes identity and narrative.
Style
McConkey’s prose is quiet, lyrical, and deceptively simple. He writes in long, carefully modulated sentences that accumulate meaning through precise observation rather than rhetorical force. He is often compared to E. B. White, Wendell Berry, and Annie Dillard, but his sensibility is more inward than White’s, less polemical than Berry’s, and less ecstatic than Dillard’s. His subject is the ordinary — a landscape, a memory, a dog — and his method is sustained, patient attention.
Critical Standing
McConkey is virtually unknown to the general reading public. He published with small presses, was not reviewed in major national publications, and never achieved the visibility that his talent deserved. Within the world of literary nonfiction and the personal essay, however, he is regarded as a master. Writers such as Scott Russell Sanders, Robert Atwan (long-time editor of The Best American Essays), and E. B. White have praised his work. His influence is felt primarily among essayists and writing teachers rather than among the broader literary culture.
Collecting McConkey
The Novels of E.M. Forster (1957, Cornell University Press) in first edition brings $20–$50. Court of Memory (1983, Dutton) brings $15–$40. His books are published in small editions and are genuinely scarce, though prices remain modest because demand is limited.