A short life of the author
J. F. Powers (James Farl Powers, 8 July 1917 – 12 June 1999) was an American short-story writer and novelist who devoted his career to a single, apparently narrow subject — the lives of Catholic priests in the American Midwest — and from that subject produced some of the finest fiction of the twentieth century. His work is funny, precise, morally acute, and entirely without sentimentality. He is the most underrated major American writer of the postwar period.
Life
Powers was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, and grew up in various Illinois and Minnesota towns. His father managed a dairy; his family was Irish-Catholic. He attended Northwestern University briefly but did not graduate. During World War II, he was a conscientious objector and spent time in a federal prison — an experience that confirmed his outsider’s perspective on American institutions.
He married Betty Wahl, a writer, in 1946, and they had five children. The family lived in Minnesota (where Powers taught at St. John’s University in Collegeville), with extended periods in Ireland, where the cost of living was lower and Powers could write without teaching. His output was small — two novels and three story collections in a career spanning five decades — because he was a perfectionist who revised obsessively.
Prince of Darkness (1947)
Powers’s first collection established his method and his territory. The title story — about a gluttonous, worldly priest who is passed over for a parish of his own — is a masterpiece of indirect characterisation: Powers never condemns Father Burner explicitly, but the accumulation of detail (the expensive cigars, the reckless driving, the fantasies of promotion) is devastating.
The stories work by immersion in the daily texture of clerical life: rectory meals, parish politics, dealings with housekeepers and curates, the gap between priestly ideals and institutional reality. Powers writes about priests the way Chekhov writes about provincial Russians — with sympathy, precision, and an unfailing ear for self-deception.
Morte d’Urban (1962)
Powers’s first novel — published fifteen years after Prince of Darkness — won the National Book Award. Father Urban is a charismatic, successful priest in the Order of St. Clement, a Clementine who has built a reputation as a speaker and fundraiser. He is reassigned to a failing retreat house in rural Minnesota, where he must contend with an incompetent superior (Father Boniface), a decaying physical plant, and the temptations of secular success represented by a wealthy benefactor, Billy Cosgrove.
The novel is a comic masterpiece in the tradition of Don Quixote and Evelyn Waugh — a story about worldliness and holiness, ambition and humility, that refuses to resolve into easy moral categories. Urban is genuinely talented and his desire to make the order successful is not ignoble, but his methods are those of a corporate executive rather than a contemplative. The ending — in which Urban suffers a mysterious blow to the head and is transformed into a genuinely humble man — is ambiguous: is it grace or brain damage?
Wheat That Springeth Green (1988)
Powers’s second novel, published twenty-six years after Morte d’Urban, follows Father Joe Hackett from seminary through decades of parish life. It is darker and more directly autobiographical than Morte d’Urban, and its portrait of a priest trying to live faithfully in a church that has been transformed by Vatican II is both funny and melancholy.
Critical Standing
Powers is admired by writers (Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, and Denis Johnson all praised him) and largely unknown to the general reading public. His subject matter — Catholic priests in Minnesota — is perceived as narrow, and his output was too small to sustain a public reputation. But the quality of his best work — “Prince of Darkness,” “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does,” “The Forks,” and Morte d’Urban — places him alongside O’Connor, Cheever, and Malamud in the first rank of postwar American short fiction.
Collecting Powers
Prince of Darkness (1947, Doubleday) in first edition with dust jacket brings $100–$400. Morte d’Urban (1962, Doubleday) in first edition brings $50–$200. Powers’s small output makes a complete collection achievable.