MILLMAN, Lawrence 1946–

PERSONAL: Born January 13, 1946, in Kansas City, MO; son of Daniel S. (a lawyer) and Zelma (an artist; maiden name, Lawrence) Millman. Education: Washington University (St. Louis, MO), B.A., 1968; Rutgers University, M.A., 1971, Ph.D., 1974. Politics: Agrarian.

ADDRESSES: Home—Box 1582, Cambridge, MA 02238.

CAREER: University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, assistant professor of English, 1973–74; writer in western Ireland, 1974–77; University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, assistant professor of English, 1977–78; Tufts University, Medford, MA, lecturer in English, 1979–80; Vermont College, Montpelier, VT, faculty advisor for Goddard M.F.A. in writing program, beginning 1981; affiliated with Harvard University Extension Program, 1985.

AWARDS, HONORS: Grant from International PEN, 1977; Bush Foundation fellowship, 1979–80; Fulbright fellowship to University of Iceland, Reykjavik, 1982; Guggenheim fellowship, 1983–84; finalist, Hemingway Award, 1983; Ludwig Vogelstein fellowship, 1986.

WRITINGS:

Our Like Will Not Be There Again (nonfiction), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1977.

St. Kilda Amen, Ashplant Press, 1979.

Hero Jesse (novel), St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1982.

Smell of Earth and Clay (Eskimo translations), White Pine, 1985.

Parliament of Ravens (stories), LoonBooks, 1986.

A Kayak Full of Ghosts (Eskimo folktales), Capra Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1987.

The Wrong Headed Man (stories), University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1988.

Last Places: A Journey in the North (travel book), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1990, with an introduction by Paul Theroux, 2000.

Wolverine Creates the World (folktales), Capra Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1992.

An Evening among Headhunters and Other Reports from Roads Less Traveled, Lumen Editions (Cambridge, MA), 1998.

Northern Latitudes: Prose Poems, New Rivers Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2000.

Lost in the Arctic: Explorations on the Edge, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Paris Was My Paramour and Other Shameless Diaries, Hobblebush Books (Brookline, NH), 2002.

Author of foreword, Elliott Merrick, Northern Nurse, Countryman Press (Woodstock, VT), 1994. Contributor to periodicals, including National Geographic, Atlantic Monthly, and Smithsonian.

SIDELIGHTS: Lawrence Millman brings the sights, culture, and oddities of other lands to life with his travel writings, such as those collected in Lost in the Arctic: Explorations on the Edge and An Evening among Headhunters and other Reports from Roads Less Traveled. His writing has been compared to that of Paul Theroux; like him, Millman disdains commonplace locations and instead seeks the obscure, soaking up strange local legends and unusual customs. His topics in An Evening among Headhunters range from the wettest tropical island in the world to the Arctic Circle. Millman's descriptions of his adventures and observations in these locales "evoke new worlds at a time when we thought we had already shrunk the globe and put it in our pocket," praised David Cline in Booklist. Discussing An Evening among Headhunters in Library Journal, Kathleen A. Shanahan commended Millman's "rare wit and humor" and his knack for enjoying his environment no matter how barren or inhospitable it might be. His enthusiasm "even makes dining on boiled walrus in an igloo in the freezing cold seem fun," she affirmed.

Millman has a particular fascination with the Arctic, and compiled thirty essays that were mostly related to that area in Lost in the Arctic: Explorations on the Edge. Some of the pieces had been published previously in books and periodicals, while seventeen of them were new. Fortune-tellers, bears, and leeches come into his stories, as well as tales of famous explorers and fiction about the Arctic region. Other essays venture into warmer regions as well. Lee Arnold, a Library Journal reviewer, found the fiction offerings the weakest part of the book, but stated that in nonfiction, Millman "clearly has few equals"; his writing is "highly amusing and unpredictable." His humor and insight are also praised by a Kirkus Reviews writer, who noted: "Even his commentary on American experiences explores our cultural frontiers."

Millman once told CA: "I tend to react eternally against a shady past: a Ph.D. in English. My point of view was formed when I lived in Ireland for two years, among old story-tellers, and listened to the verbal eloquence with which uneducated and illiterate people can speak."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Brown, George Mackay, Under Brinkie's Brae, Gordon Wright, 1980.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic, March, 1990, p. 117.

Booklist, April 15, 1998, David Cline, review of An Evening among Headhunters and Other Reports from the Road Less Traveled, p. 1415.

Boston Globe, March 25, 1990.

Boston Herald, January 28, 1990.

Cambridge Chronicle, December 24, 1987.

Chicago Tribune, October 25, 1987, p. 6.

Kansas City Star, June 5, 1977; January 15, 1989.

Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 1998, review of An Evening among Headhunters and Other Reports from Roads Less Traveled, p. 475; August 1, 2002, review of Lost in the Arctic: Explorations on the Edge, p. 1102.

Kliatt, September, 1994, review of Hero Jesse, p. 10.

Library Journal, April 15, 1998, Kathleen A. Shanahan, review of An Evening among Headhunters and Other Reports from Roads Less Traveled, p. 105; September 1, 2002, Lee Arnold, review of Lost in the Arctic, p. 200.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 21, 1990, p. 6; July 4, 1993, review of Wolverine Creates the World, p. 9.

New Yorker, February 26, 1990, p. 132.

New York Review of Science Fiction, December, 1991.

New York Times Book Review, June 19, 1977; December 11, 1988, p. 14; June 10, 1990, p. 48; October 30, 1994, review of Hero Jesse, p. 52.

North Shore Magazine, July 12, 1990.

Orcadian, August 9, 1977; September 6, 1979.

Portsmouth Herald, January 9, 1982.

Publishers Weekly, April 13, 1998, review of An Evening among Headhunters and Other Reports from Roads Less Traveled, p. 64.

Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), November 3, 2002, Bill Holm, review of Lost in the Arctic.

Times (London, England), May 21, 1990.

Times Educational Supplement, December 23, 1994, review of Last Places, p. 19.

Virginia Quarterly Review, autumn, 1994, review of Hero Jesse, p. 143.