Donald Gutierrez

Donald Kenneth Gutierrez (March 10, 1932 – October 29, 2013)[1] was an American writer and professor emeritus of English literature.

Biography

The eldest son of Latin-American immigrants, he was born in Oakland, California, in 1932. He taught at the University of Notre Dame and the Western New Mexico University in Silver City, New Mexico. He studied English literature at University of California, Berkeley in the early 1950s. Gutierrez left Berkeley in 1958 to pursue a career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Library in New York, and wound up at book publisher Grosset & Dunlap.

He returned to California to receive a PhD from UCLA in 1964 and later joined the Notre Dame English department. Gutierrez returned to Notre Dame on a research scholarship, shortly before finishing a book on Kenneth Rexroth that renowned former Notre Dame president and head, Reverend ("Father") Theodore M. Hesburgh, placed in Notre Dame's Hesburgh Library (Special Collection).

Career

Gutierrez was a scholar of D. H. Lawrence, and wrote about the last period (late 1920s) of Lawrence, whom Gutierrez describes as having dealt with death and symbolic renewal in an "ontological" manner, a lens through which Lawrence offered keen insights into humankind and society. An erstwhile Berkeley student who observed the "Bohemian-literati" world in the 1950s, Gutierrez has also written memoirs and commentaries on the "Beat" scenes of Berkeley and San Francisco. Gutierrez also produced many works on Kenneth Rexroth and other writers of that time.

Gutierrez' post-2000 work and writings moved away from an academic focus of literature and fine arts, and he latterly wrote articles and essays more as a social and political commentator, with topics of: social justice, human rights abuses, economic inequities, and the major role he feels U.S. domestic and foreign policy plays in these. He was an outspoken critic of political repression, international war criminals (Chile's Augusto Pinochet, Guatemala's Efraín Ríos Montt, Nicaragua's Somoza, Panama's Manuel Noriega, etc.), the United States' "School of the Americas" (the Department of Defense's Spanish-speaking training facility), the U.S. military engagements in Iraq, Bosnia, Vietnam, the current torture and imprisonment practices the U.S. is claimed to participate in (including "extraordinary rendition" and "dark cells") and the policies of the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

Gutierrez wrote six books, more than 100 essays, papers and book reviews. He contributed numerous essays to journals, newspapers, universities, and online publishers, including the El Dorado Sun,[2] the North Dakota Quarterly,[3] Progressive San Francisco Latino newspaper, El Tecolote, the D. H. Lawrence Review,[4] the Malahat Review, the University of California's "California Alumni Association", Mosaic, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Texas Quarterly, Twentieth Century Literature, and Studies in Short Fiction.

Works

Books by Gutierrez

Essays and articles by Gutierrez

Book reviews by Gutierrez

Dates are review dates

Papers by Gutierrez in Spanish

Lectures, readings by Gutierrez

Honors, awards

Related links

References

  1. ↑ "Gutierrez, Donald Kenneth". Albuquerque Journal. Retrieved 2013-12-13.
  2. ↑ Contributing Writers, El Dorado Sun, May 2004
  3. ↑ Content, North Dakota Quarterly; Volume 71, Number 4; Fall 2004
  4. ↑ Contents, D. H. Lawrence in the Southwest, Volume 25, nos. 1-3, 1993 and 1994
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/17/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.