Gordon Lish

Gordon Lish was raised in Hewlett, New York on Long Island; his father was a partner in Lish Brothers, a millinery firm. During his formative years, he suffered from extreme psoriasis and was often ostracized by his peers. He attended Phillips Academy but left without graduating following an altercation with an antisemitic classmate in 1952. 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. In November 1956, Lish married Loretta Frances Fokes; they would go on to have three children.

After Carruth advised him to attend college, Lish matriculated at the University of Arizona, mainly because the climate ameliorated his psoriasis. He majored in English & 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. Nevertheless, Lish completed his degree in two years with honors, graduating in 1959.

Following Lish's college graduation, the family moved to San Francisco; here Lish experienced the last vestiges of the San Francisco Renaissance and completed a teaching credential at San Francisco State University in 1960. Following another move to Burlingame, California, he took a position as an English teacher at Mills High School in Millbrae, California, where he joined a new Pacific Coast avant-garde literary journal, Chrysalis Review, edited by the San Francisco writer, John Herrmann. When Herrmann left the magazine, Lish took it over, and eventually it evolved into Genesis West.