Henry Van Dyke (novelist)

He died of heart failure on December 22, 2011, at the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home, to which he had recently moved when he felt he was failing and nearing the end.

Van Dyke won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971 and, in 1974, a Richard Rodgers Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Starting in 1969, he taught Creative Writing at Kent State University, shuttling between Kent, Ohio, and New York City, where he had an apartment in Kips Bay, on the East River. He retired from Kent State University in 1993 and concentrated on writing his memoirs for posthumous publication.

While at Michigan, he had won an Avery Hopwood Award for Fiction, which steered him toward creative writing. After moving to New York and getting on the editorial staff of Basic Books he settled down to serious writing in his spare time, and in 1965 his first novel, Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes was picked up by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. He would later write three more novels. His shorter pieces appeared in Transatlantic Review, Antioch Review, Story Quarterly and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

Van Dyke served two years in the U.S. Army after World War II, stationed in Germany, where he learned to speak German. After graduating with an MA in 1955 he worked for a short time as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier, then spent two years as a scientific editor at the Engineering Research Institute of the University of Michigan, with some true confessions-type hackwork on the side.

Henry L. Van Dyke, Jr. (October 3, 1928 – December 22, 2011), was an American novelist, editor, teacher and musician.

Henry Van Dyke was born in Allegan, Michigan on October 3, 1928, to an academic family. He spent his childhood in Montgomery, Alabama, where his father taught at Alabama State Teachers College.