His wife, Diane Cecily, said the cause was heart failure.
Kinder, who taught writing at the University of Pittsburgh for many years, was known for lively classes, livelier parties, a few memorable if underappreciated books and a certain literary-bad-boy posture.
“In a sense, his ‘outlaw’ persona, while it’s in part a way of camouflaging himself away from preciousness and self-regard, is also completely earned, in artistic terms,” novelist Richard Ford told The Pittsburgh Tribune Review in 2014 on the occasion of Kinder’s retirement from teaching. “Somewhere back in the blear past, Chuck might have known some rules about how novels ought to be framed, but he pretty quickly went beyond the rules and found forms and fascinations and imperatives that suited what he thought was important to write.”
Perhaps his biggest claim to fame, though, was being the inspiration for a character in a novel written by Chabon, who had studied under him in the 1980s at Pitt. The book was “Wonder Boys,” published in 1995, and it involved the tribulations of a professor named Grady Tripp who, among other problems, had a manuscript he couldn’t quite finish. Writer’s block wasn’t the problem.
“The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite,” Tripp, the novel’s narrator, says. “I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within.”
In a 2001 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, Chabon explained Kinder’s role in inspiring that character (who was played by Michael Douglas in Curtis Hanson’s 2000 film version).
“I remember peering into his office and seeing this monolithic pile of white paper — the inverse of the monolith from ‘2001’ — under his desk lamp,” Chabon said. “In my memory, it was 4,000 pages long. He was proud of how big a bastard it was.”
The occasion for that interview was that Kinder had finally wrestled his long-gestating manuscript into a book of reasonable length: “Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale.”
“At one point, the book really did end up to be about three volumes of about 1,000 pages each,” Kinder told The Chronicle. “In my mind, it was like ‘Ulysses’ meets ‘On the Road’ meets ‘Dune’ meets ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ meets ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’ It was full of magical realism and a lot of ghost stuff, and even some spaceships landing on my rooftop in San Francisco.”
“Honeymooners” chronicled the adventures of two writers, one of whom seemed a lot like Carver (who died in 1988) and one of whom was a lot like Kinder himself.
Jay McInerney reviewed the book in The New York Times. “Like the candy mint that is also a breath mint,” he wrote, “it can be enjoyed as either a novel or a memoir. Or, if you prefer, as a metafictional object. Whatever. If ‘Honeymooners’ doesn’t make you laugh, cry and cringe with sympathetic embarrassment, then you should probably adjust your medication immediately.”
Charles Alfonso Kinder II was born on Oct. 8, 1942, in Montgomery, West Virginia, to Charles and Eileen (Parsons) Kinder. His father served in World War II, and his mother was an emergency-room nurse.
Kinder was raised in various towns in West Virginia. He drew on that upbringing in his fiction, and also revisited it in “Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life” (2004), for which he returned to the state on a sabbatical to write about some of its characters and oddities.
“Geographically and historically,” he wrote, “West Virginia defies easy classification. On the map, West Virginia’s amoebic squashed road-kill shape can put one in mind of any number of unusual things, depending upon the hour of the long night, and what manner of chemicals are raging through one’s bloodstream. Sometimes, and don’t ask me why exactly, when I gaze at a map of West Virginia at maybe three or four in the morning, I think of a more or less anatomically correct representation of a lumpy, damaged human heart.”
He first attended a technical college but then enrolled at West Virginia University, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1967 and a master’s degree the next year. His master’s thesis, his wife said, became his first novel, “Snakehunter,” published in 1973. It also got him a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University, where Richard Scowcroft was leading a creative-writing program that was a magnet for talent.
“That is where he met this incredible collection of writers,” Cecily said, Carver among them. “It was just that time.”
She said Kinder sought to re-create that environment when he joined the Pitt faculty in 1980. They had married in 1975, and their house in Pittsburgh became a center of gravity for students, faculty members and visiting writers.
“He included hundreds of writers in his embrace, and he’d root for you and read your stuff many years after you had the pleasure to sit in his classroom, which was often his living room,” the novelist Jane McCafferty, a former student who now teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, said by email.
Kinder’s other books included “The Silver Ghost” (1979) and two 2014 poetry collections “All That Yellow” and “Imagination Motel.”
His first marriage, to Janet Weaver, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a brother, David, and a sister, Beth Kemper.
On Kinder’s Facebook page, former students and longtime friends have been posting remembrances. One was James Handloser, who had known Kinder since childhood in West Virginia.
“He once referred to our childhood days as ‘those sweet, innocent lightning bug spring and summer times when boy detectives could solve any mystery except those in the center of their own lives,’” Handloser wrote. “Such dazzling words seemed to come easy to him.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.