Remarks on the Passing of Cyrus Colter

Gibbons presents aremarks for Cyrus Colter, author and board member of Dalkey Archive Press, on the writer's memorial service. Despite his remarkable accomplishments as a fiction writer, he was generally ignored by critics, with a few notable exceptions. Colter had three careers- many years in the law, a half-dozen years in higher education at Northwestern, and the last several decades of his life as an active writer. This was an extraordinarily full life. He began writing at the age of fifty, published short stories in literary journals, and at the age of sixty published his first book, the memorable collection The Beach Umbrella, which was selected by judges Kurt Vonnegut and Vance Bourjaily as the first winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award and published in 1970 by the University of Iowa Press.