James Buechler

All of James Buechler's fiction is set in or near Schenectady, NY, though the city's name is never used, roughly between 1930 and 1960. His family lived in one of the high gabled two-family houses like those pictured in Charles Burchfield's watercolor "Six O'Clock" -- the supper hour -- used as the cover illustration for his book IN THAT HEAVEN THERE SHOULD BE A PLACE FOR ME. Both of his grandfathers, as well as his father and his mother, worked for the General Electric Company. For them and for many others it was a time before the automobile, and Buechler became familiar with the city and countryside on foot, later on his bicycle, later still as a passenger in cars owned by someone else, and finally, in his twenties, on a motorcycle like the Harley-Davidson in his first published story, which won 2nd Prize in the O. Henry Awards volume for 1956.

The Schenectady public schools were good enough to send him to Harvard, where he studied writing with the poet Archibald MacLeish and edited the literary magazine. He graduated summa cum laude with a degree in history and literature in June, 1955. In September he married Hope Collier, a student at Radcliffe, and the couple spent the next six months in Europe on a Harvard traveling fellowship.

Between 1956 and 1965 Buechler and his young family lived in Schenectady, where he worked first as a newspaper reporter and then as an instructor at Union College; in Iowa, while he was at the Iowa Writers Workshop; and in New Jersey, where he was for seven years the only full-time English teacher at rural St. Bernard's School. He coached the wrestling team and in addition to his own fiction wrote five books in The Hardy Boys series as "Franklin W. Dixon".

He sent his own stories to the mass market magazines where they might be widely read. His story "The Proud Suitor", published in MADEMOISELLE, was seen by poet and critic Allen Tate, who included it THE HOUSE OF FICTION, a short story textbook in wide use for fifteen years. His cross-country running story "John Sobieski Runs", initially published in THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, also had an extended life. It can still be read in THE RUNNER'S LITERARY COMPANION (Breakaway Books,1994) as well as in Buechler's own collection.

Buechler spent two years (1965-67) as Writer/Teacher at Stanford University. His story "The Second Best Girl" appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories collection for 1967.

Over the next 25 years he taught in the public schools of Duxbury, MA, while directing the English program in grades 6-12.

His book IN THAT HEAVEN THERE SHOULD BE A PLACE FOR ME was called "....this superb collection of ten stories set in the 1950s" in a starred review in Publishers Weekly, the industry journal, when it appeared in 1994.

Buechler and his wife now live near Taos, NM.