Harold Jaffe (July 8, 1938 - June 23, 2024) was an American experimental novelist, essayist, and editor whose four-decade career placed him at the center of U.S. innovative fiction. Born in New York City, educated at Grinnell College (B.A.) and New York University (Ph.D. in English and American Literature, with Distinction), he joined San Diego State University in 1982 and retired as Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature in 2019. He died in San Diego in 2024, aged 85.
Jaffe is most strongly identified with the form he named docufiction: short prose that takes news reports, court records, and other documentary source material and treats them with pointed fictional intervention to expose the ideology hidden in their original telling. From Mole's Pity (Fiction Collective, 1979) and Mourning Crazy Horse (1982) through Eros Anti-Eros (City Lights, 1990), Straight Razor (FC2, 1995), 15 Serial Killers (Raw Dog Screaming, 2003), Terror-Dot-Gov (2005), Sacred Outcast: Dispatches from India (Anti-Oedipus, 2017), and the late Brando Bleeds (2022) and Kafka Kafka (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), he produced roughly thirty books across fiction, docufiction, essays, plays, and documentary poems.
For 42 years he was editor-in-chief of Fiction International, the thematic literary journal that relocated to SDSU with him in 1982 and became one of the longest-running U.S. venues committed to formal innovation and social activism across borders.
His JEF Books titles include OD: Docufictions (2012), Paris 60 (2012), Othello Blues (revised, 2014), Goosestep (2016), Porn-Anti-Porn (2019), and the posthumous The Infected Desert: Israel at War with the Palestinians (October 2024). JEF also published The Literary Terrorism of Harold Jaffe, the Festschrift volume gathering critical writing on his work.
He received two NEA Fellowships in fiction, two Fulbright Fellowships (to India and the Czech Republic), a New York CAPS grant, a California Arts Council fellowship, a COMBO fellowship, and three Pushcart Prizes. His work has been translated into roughly fifteen languages, among them German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French, Turkish, Dutch, Czech, Polish, Farsi, and Serbo-Croatian.
Start with Eros Anti-Eros (City Lights, 1990) for the early docufiction voice, then Goosestep for the JEF stretch.
