DAVID GIBSON WRITING

  Every writer has at least one precursor who serves as a lodestone--someone whose example recharges their literary batteries. If one lives long enough there can be more than one, for each period in a writer’s growth. One in particular to whom I return again and again is Andre Dubus. He taught at my alma mater for a dozen years before I arrived, but circumstances cut his teaching career short. Dubus was known primarily as a writer of stories, which usually appeared in literary journals and in some commercial magazines also. He was known mainly to other writers and a slew of editors though I am sure there were many fans of great contemporary fiction, like myself, who have loved his writing over the years. He has become somewhat eclipsed by the success of his oldest son, Andre Dubus III, whose novels and a memoir called Townies have become quite celebrated, and with good cause. The unfortunate circumstances of Dubus’s personal story have somewhat eclipsed his