In a post-Occupy landscape, Guthrie's topical, rabble-rousing spirit seems infused into everything from the street-marching 'guitararmy' in New York City and elsewhere, often led by Chicago-area native Tom Morello, to the latest output from Bruce Springsteen (his new album, his SXSW keynote speech). That would have been clear this year - even without a string of celebrations marking Guthrie's 100th birthday. But as Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter and the overseer of the Archives, told me earlier this year, 'The influence of my father's music lives today, and will live throughout the 21st century.' Guthrie himself certainly never got rich off his music, and I don't think anyone else has, either. He continued, foreshadowing the collection of his notebooks, lyrics and artwork that now constitutes the Woody Guthrie Archives: 'And when somebody steps in and buys up all of your diaries and scribblings and songs and poems they call you the greatest feller which ever lived, so's your debtors and loaners can get rich off the stink of your dead bones and yaller pages of ideas.' 'After you starve clean to the rim of death they call you a professional, and after you die off they call you a great genius.' 'The hungrier you get up here in New York, the more they run your picture,' Guthrie wrote to his younger sister in 1949, inserting a photo of himself from The New York Times. He knew how the fame game worked - it hasn't changed much, even since his 1940s folksinging heyday - and he seemed to know exactly what would happen to his own musical legacy. He is a third-generation Korean American.Woody Guthrie, despite his aw-shucks Okie persona, was no fool. program in creative writing in Philadelphia. He is currently a professor in Temple University's M.F.A. Brown Literary Award for emerging novelists from the University of Pittsburgh's creative writing program.įrom 1988 to 2007, he was the principal editor of the literary journal Ploughshares.

In 2007, he received the inaugural Fred R. Botolph Club Foundation, and residencies from Yaddo and the Lannan Foundation. He has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the St. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize, and his stories have been published in The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, GQ, The North American Review, The Gettysburg Review, Manoa, American Short Fiction, Glimmer Train, Charlie Chan Is Dead 2, Screaming Monkeys, Narrative, and elsewhere. All of his books have been published by W. He is also the author of the novel The Collective, which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature from the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association the novel Wrack and Ruin, which was a finalist for the Thurber Prize the novel Country of Origin, which won an American Book Award, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and a Mixed Media Watch Image Award for Outstanding Fiction and the story collection Yellow, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Members Choice Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Don Lee is the author most recently of the novel Lonesome Lies Before Us.

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