 When Jim the Boy came out in the spring of 2000, the critical response surprised Earley. The novel was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, which praised the book. "Set in Depression-era North Carolina, his year-in-the-life story of a rural boyhood unmarked by parental abuse, erotic turmoil or domestic dysfunction seems strangely brave and new," wrote Walter Kirn in the Times. Newsweek and a host of other major publications lavished similar praise on the book.
"I really underestimated the critical response," says Earley. "I didn’t expect it to happen, but I’m gratified that it did."
Earley is now more comfortable with himself and his role as a writer. An assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University, Earley teaches young, eager students and sees the writer that he once was in them. And he points to his experiences at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where he has been a Walter E. Dakin Fellow and a faculty member, as seminal in his development as a writer.
"The amazing thing about the Sewanee Writers’ Conference is that it’s swarming with good writers. And you actually get to talk to them," he says. "The Conference has provided me with models, not only artistic models, but personal models about how writers should comport themselves in the world."
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"Childhood innocence doesn't crop up much these days in serious fiction. . . .Tony Earley's first novel, Jim the Boy, blithely and successfully counters this trend."
• Time
"With the calm, measured quiet of a writer who knows absolutely what he is about, Tony Earley renders luminous one boy, one family, one very small town—and, by delicate implication, the wide world just beyond that charmed circle."
• Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal
"What Tony Earley's offers in Jim the Boy is not a feast but something perhaps much rarer, something akin to the perfect meal: rich and satisfying, but wholesome just the same."
• Chicago Tribune
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