Carkeet's memoir, Campus Sexpot (University of Georgia Press, 2005), tells of the impact on his life made by a 1961 novel of the same name written by a former English teacher at his high school.
[10] In addition to inspiring Carkeet's memoir, the original novel generated a fictional sequel, From Roundheel To Revolutionary: Linda Franklin After Campus Sexpot, by Jeff Daiell.
Carkeet has adapted selected Mark Twain works into stage plays--"Buck Fanshaw's Funeral," "Cannibalism in the Cars," "The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm," and others.
[11][12] Carkeet has written some three dozen general interest essays for The Village Voice, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Poets & Writers, The Oxford American, and the online journals Salon and The Morning News.
His critical and scholarly production includes an often-cited analysis of the dialects in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn[13][14] In 1981, Carkeet was nominated for an Edgar Award in the first-novel category by the Mystery Writers of America for Double Negative, published the year before.