As soon as he sold his first story, to the perceptive science-fiction editor Cele Goldsmith, he became freelance, and supported himself almost solely through his writing from that point on.Īlong with Samuel R. In Manhattan he attended but did not graduate from Cooper Union and New York University, where I first met him. He had volunteered for military service in his late teens, but was soon given a medical discharge.

His father was a door-to-door salesman he became close to his four siblings (who survive him) only after he left Minneapolis for New York. Thomas Michael Disch was born in Des Moines, Iowa, just before the Second World War, and was raised Catholic in Minnesota. But the personal disasters he suffered in the 21st century, to which he gave permanent shape in the many poems he published on his LiveJournal after 2005, raised this dialogue with death to a new intensity to put an end to his life, as he spoke frequently of doing, was to cap that life in his own way, and to demonstrate that he really had meant what he had been saying over the 45 years of his prolific career.

Disch, by his own hand, on the Fourth of July, was the last act of a drama that had been unfolding in public for several years.Īs the author of a large number of death-haunted science-fiction novels and stories, and of several Gothic tales which treat modern America as a land of the dead, and of a huge body of poetry much of which danced with death in formal measure, Disch could from the first have been described as a writer well versed in terminus. The death of the American writer Thomas M.

Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch