[2] As a literary editor, he championed many American authors, particularly Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Rick Bass, Tom Spanbauer, and Richard Ford.
While briefly institutionalized in Westchester County, New York, following an adverse reaction to the hormone ACTH (used in psoriasis treatment), he developed a friendship with noted poet Hayden Carruth.
[3] Following his release, he took a job as a radio broadcaster for WEIL in New Haven, Connecticut, under the pseudonym of Gordo Lockwood and continued to correspond with Carruth, who introduced Lish to the Partisan Review.
He majored in English and German and clashed with creative writing instructor Edward Loomis, an adherent of the New Criticism who routinely disparaged Lish's more idiosyncratic influences, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac.
[9] The outré nature of Genesis West incensed school board officials, and Lish was denied tenure in 1963; two fellow teachers left in protest, and the kerfuffle was covered by The Nation.
After refusing a fellowship at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a teaching position at Deep Springs College, Lish became editor-in-chief and director of linguistic studies at Behavioral Research Laboratories in Menlo Park, California.
Here he became known as "Captain Fiction" for the number of authors whose careers he assisted, including Carver, Richard Ford, Cynthia Ozick, Don DeLillo, Reynolds Price, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Raymond Kennedy, Alexander Theroux, and Barry Hannah.
With the exception of Ozick and DeLillo, all of these writers taught and/or studied in academic creative writing programs, reflecting a totemic shift in the institutionalization of American literature.
Lish left Esquire in 1977 as senior editor to take a position with the publishing firm of Alfred A. Knopf; he retained the same title and remained there until 1995.
At Knopf, he continued to champion new fiction, publishing works by Ozick, Carver, Hannah, Anderson Ferrell, David Leavitt, Amy Hempel, Noy Holland, Lynne Tillman, Will Ferguson, Harold Brodkey, and Joy Williams.
[8] After Lish retired from both teaching and publishing, some of his students continued to make noted contributions to American letters; the National Book Award was won in 2004 by Lily Tuck for The News from Paraguay, a novel.
Other former students whose writing has met with praise include Diane Williams, Dawn Raffel, William Tester, Victoria Redel, Garielle Lutz, Ben Marcus, Sam Lipsyte, Will Eno, and Bahamian writer Garth Buckner, whose The Origins of Solitude was met with some critical acclaim.
[14] Other writers who give thanks to Lish in books published by him at Alfred A. Knopf include Brian Evenson, Noy Holland, Patricia Lear, Dawn Raffel and Victoria Redel (Where the Road Bottoms Out).
The Quarterly introduced such authors as J. E. Pitts, Jason Schwartz, Jane Smiley, Mark Richard, Bruce Holland Rogers, and Jennifer Allen.
For the June 1991 issue of Vanity Fair, James Wolcott wrote a profile on Gordon Lish and Don DeLillo called "The Sunshine Boys."
"[21] Conversely, Stephen King in The New York Times described Lish's influence as 'baleful' and heartless, singling out the story 'The Bath' as 'a total re-write' and 'a cheat'.
"[32] In a 2003 interview with The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Diane Williams said, “I studied with Gordon for two semesters in New York because I understood what he was offering—the special chance to become hugely conscious of how language can be manipulated to produce maximum effects.
So often, in our naturally powerful speech, we only understand dimly how we are doing it, so that we are deprived of the good fortune of being in charge of it, rather than the other way around.”[33] He received an honorary doctor of letters from the State University of New York at Oneonta in 1994.
[36] David Leavitt's novel Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing documents the narrator's experiences under the tutelage of Gordon Lish.
So in two ways his workshop extended beyond the established boundaries of the classroom: if he really liked what you were doing, he might sleep with you, or he might publish your book... Lish’s willingness to be bored and show it was one of his strengths as an instructor.
Among his comments are that "Philip Roth is full of shit"; Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Lethem do not deserve their reputations; Lydia Davis is "ridiculously overrated"; "I can't read Paul Auster anymore"; the redesign of The New Yorker was a "dreadful error"; and literary magazine n+1 is a "crock of shit.