Conger BeasleyJr.

Conger Beasley Jr. (August 21, 1940 - August 9, 2016) was an American novelist, essayist, and nature writer whose work moved between experimental fiction and award-winning literary nonfiction of the American West. Born William Conger Beasley Jr. in St. Joseph, Missouri, he was educated at Choate, Columbia University, and New York University, wrote his first novel during seven months in rural England, and then settled in the Kansas City area for the rest of his life. He taught American Literature at Park University, worked at Universal Press Syndicate and Andrews McMeel Publishers from 1970 to 1982 as one of the company's earliest employees, and in the 1980s and 1990s co-published and edited the Kansas City small press Woods Colt Press. He died in 2016, aged 75.

Across four decades he published roughly nineteen books. His landmark literary nonfiction includes Sundancers and River Demons: Essays on Landscape and Ritual (University of Arkansas Press, 1990), winner of the 1991 Thorpe Menn Award for Literary Excellence; We Are a People of This World: The Lakota Sioux and the Massacre at Wounded Knee (University of Arkansas Press, 1995), winner of the 1995 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Nonfiction; and Eyes Open in the Dark: 8 Essays (BkMk Press, 1996). He also received the 1991 World Hunger Media Award for journalism.

His fiction is more playful and formally restless: the early Hidalgo's Beard: A California Fantasy (1979), the comic The Ptomaine Kid: A Hamburger Western, and his single JEF Books title, A Little Story about Maurice Ravel (Volume 65, 2015), in which the French composer is reduced to doll size and stranded on the way to a Spain he has never seen. JEF published it the year before his death.

His standing is institutionalized in the Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction, a $2,000 annual prize administered by BkMk Press and New Letters magazine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Start with A Little Story about Maurice Ravel for the JEF chapter of his work.