National Book Award-winning writer and Sacramento resident tackles homelessness and daughter’s death
Photo of William Vollman by Øystein Vidnes CC BY-SA 2.0
William Vollmann, a 64-year-old writer who lives in Sacramento and won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction for Europe Central, could theoretically rest on his laurels.
Vollmann, though, has made a career of never quite doing what people expect, from traveling with the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the early 1980s to making friends with prostitutes. “He’s traveled the world seeking out extremity; he’s nearly frozen to death in the Arctic and survived hitting a land mine in Bosnia,” Mother Jones noted about Vollmann in 2009.
Vollmann’s latest unexpected move: an 8,581-word essay for the November 2023 issue of Harper’s, “Four Men.”
The four men in the essay are Vollmann himself and three homeless men—Roland, Jesse and Happily—whom Vollmann found and paid for their time during a trip to Reno in March 2023. He also writes of the death of his daughter, Lisa, who died of alcohol-related causes in 2022.
“Roland and Happily asked for nothing, so I must have done right by them; any day now I’ll get a medal,” Vollmann writes late in the piece. “A blanket was all Jesse kept asking for. Sure, he was using me, and a blanket would hardly have enabled him to get out of here and get back to normal. But I should have bought him a blanket all the same, and I should have come home a day earlier when Lisa was standing in her socks in the rain.”
As it goes with Vollmann, his essay is a long but wonderfully unique read about heartwrenching subject matter.
