Dobyns was born on February 19, 1941 in Orange, New Jersey to Lester L., an Episcopal minister, and Barbara Johnston Dobyns. Dobyns was raised in New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. He was educated at Shimer College, transferred to and graduated from Wayne State University in 1964, and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1967. He has worked as a reporter for the Detroit News. He has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University. In 1995, as a professor of English at Syracuse University, he was accused of sexual harassment after an incident in which he also threw a drink at his accuser and made a single snarky and unkind remark about her in front of numerous witnesses. Syracuse University rejected his subsequent denial of the accusation and suspended him for two years, after which he resigned. Francine Prose however defended him-- as did university professor/writers Tobias Wolf, Hayden Carruth, Agha Shahid Ali, et al -- by portraying his accuser and the school as having reacted to outdated neo-Victorian victim-feminism policies.
Works
Dobyns has written twenty-four novels in a variety of genres, as well as fourteen poetry collections and two non-fiction works about the craft of poetry. In much of his work, Dobyns uses the ridiculous and the absurd as vehicles to introduce more profound meditations on life, love, and art. His journalistic training has strongly informed this voice. His poetry has won numerous accolades, including a Lamont Poetry Selection, a National Poetry Series selection, and a Melville Cane Award. His novel Cold Dog Soup has been made into two films, the AmericanCold Dog Soup and the French Doggy Bag. Two Deaths of Señora Puccini has been made into the film Two Deaths. The movie Wild Turkey is based on one of his short stories. Dobyns has written many detective stories about a private detective named Charlie Bradshaw who works out of Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. Bradshaw is unusual as a private eye protagonist, an ordinary man who was once a police officer. All the books have the word "Saratoga" in the title. In the comic novel The Wrestler's Cruel Study, the protagonist roams through a modern cityscape governed by fairy-tale rituals, searching for his missing fiancée. He is alternately aided or hindered by a Friedrich Nietzsche -quoting manager and his Hegelian nemesis, to find that his wrestling matches are choreographed by a shadowy organization that enacts their various Gnostic theological debates through the pageantry and panoply of the ring. He eventually learns to resolve his own dualistic nature and determine who he is despite the role he plays. The Church of Dead Girls is a novel about a small town's hysterical response to the mysterious disappearance of three of its teenaged girls. Boy in the Water is a novel about events in a secluded private school in the United States. Jenny Hilborne, wrote in New York Journal of Books that The Burn Palace "is an intriguing fictional mystery set in the town of Brewster, Rhode Island, and includes elements of the supernatural, satanism, and other alternate religions, including neo-pagans, Wicca, and witchcraft...mysterious and engaging...” Is Fat Bob Dead Yet? was named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Mysteries of 2015.
