Guy Mattison Davenport (November 23, 1927 – January 4, 2005) was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.

Life[link]

Guy Davenport was born in Anderson, South Carolina, in the foothills of Appalachia on November 23, 1927. His father was an agent for the Railway Express Agency. Davenport said that he became a reader only at age ten, with a neighbor’s gift of one of the Tarzan series.^[1] At age eleven, he began a neighborhood newspaper, drawing all the illustrations and writing all the stories.^[2] At age thirteen, he "broke [his] right leg (skating) and was laid up for a wearisome while"; it was then that he began "reading with real interest",^[3] beginning with a biography of Leonardo.^[4] He left high school early and enrolled at Duke University a few weeks after his seventeenth birthday.^[5] At Duke, he studied art^[6](with Clare Leighton), graduating with a degree in classics and English literature.

Davenport was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, from 1948 to 1950. He studied Old English under J. R. R. Tolkien and wrote Oxford’s first thesis on James Joyce. In 1950, upon his return to the United States, Davenport was drafted into the US Army for two years, spending them at Fort Bragg in the 756th Field Artillery, then in the XVIII Airborne Corps. After the army, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis until 1955, when he began earning a PhD at Harvard, studying under Harry Levin and Archibald MacLeish.

Davenport befriended Ezra Pound during the poet’s incarceration in St. Elizabeths Hospital, visiting him annually from 1952 until Pound's release in 1958, and later at his home in Rapallo, Italy. Davenport described one such visit, in 1963, in the story "Ithaka". Davenport wrote his dissertation on Pound’s poetry, published as Cities on Hills in 1983.

After completing his Ph.D., he taught at Haverford College from 1961 to 1963 but soon took a position at the University of Kentucky, "the remotest offer with the most pay" (as he wrote to Jonathan Williams). Davenport taught at Kentucky until he received a MacArthur Fellowship, which prompted his retirement at the end of 1990.

Davenport was married briefly in the early 1960s.^[7] He dedicated Eclogues, 1981, to "Bonnie Jean" (Cox), his companion from 1965^[8] until his death.^[9] Other Davenport volumes dedicated to Cox include Objects on a Table, 1998, and The Death of Picasso, 2004. Cox became Trustee for the Guy Davenport Estate.^[10]

The range of Davenport's literary and artistic friendships was remarkable. In addition to Pound and Williams, Davenport knew Hugh Kenner, Laurence Scott, Louis Zukofsky, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Middleton, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, Buckminster Fuller, Eudora Welty, Samuel R. Delany, Robert Kelly, James Laughlin, Allen Ginsberg, Stan Brakhage, Ronald Johnson, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, his neighbor.

Two sentences he wrote about Meatyard apply to himself as well: "He was rare among American artists in that he was not obsessed with his own image in the world. He could therefore live in perfect privacy in a rotting Kentucky town."^[11]

In one of his essays, Davenport claimed to "live almost exclusively off fried baloney, Campbell's soup, and Snickers bars".^[12]

He died of lung cancer on January 4, 2005, in Lexington, Kentucky.^[13]

Writing[link]

Davenport began publishing fiction in 1970 with "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," which is based on Kafka's visit to an air show in September 1909. His books include Tatlin!, Da Vinci's Bicycle, Eclogues, Apples and Pears, The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers, A Table of Green Fields, The Cardiff Team, and Wo es war, soll ich werden. His fiction uses three general modes of exposition: the fictionalizing of historical events and figures; the foregrounding of formal narrative experiments, especially with the use of collage; and the depicting of a Fourierist utopia, where small groups of men, women, and children have eliminated the separation between mind and body.

The first of more than four hundred Davenport essays, articles, introductions, and book reviews appeared while he was still an undergraduate; the last, just weeks before his death. Davenport was a regular reviewer for National Review and The Hudson Review, and, late in his life, at the invitation of John Jeremiah Sullivan, he spent a year writing the "New Books" column for Harper's Magazine. His essays range from literary to social topics, from brief book reviews to lectures such as the title piece in his first collection of essays, The Geography of the Imagination. His other collections of essays were Every Force Evolves a Form and The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art.

He also published two slim volumes on art: A Balthus Notebook and Objects on a Table. Although he wrote on many topics, Davenport, who never had a driver's license, was especially passionate about the destruction of American cities by the automobile.

Davenport published a handful of poems. The longest are the book-length Flowers and Leaves, an intricate meditation on art and America, and "The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard" (borrowing the title from a painting by Stanley Spencer). A selection of his poems and translations was published as Thasos and Ohio.

Davenport translated ancient Greek texts, particularly from the archaic period. These were published in periodicals, then small volumes, and finally collected in 7 Greeks. He also translated the occasional other piece, including a few poems of Rilke's, some ancient Egyptian texts [after Boris de Rachewiltz]), and, with Benjamin Urrutia, the sayings of Jesus, published as The Logia of Yeshua.

Visual art[link]

With his childhood newspaper, Davenport launched both his literary and artistic vocations. The former remained dormant or sporadic for some time while the latter, "making drawings, watercolors, and gouaches, [continued] throughout school, the army, and his early years as a teacher."^[14] He drew or painted nearly every day of his life,^[15] and his notebooks contain drawings and pasted-in illustrations and photos cheek by jowl with his own observations and other writings and quotations from others.

From college forward, Davenport supplied cover art and decorations to literary periodicals. He also supplied illustrations for others' books, notably two by Hugh Kenner: The Stoic Comedians (1962) and The Counterfeiters (1968).^[16]

As a visual artist (and childhood newspaper magnate) who also wrote, Davenport had a lifelong interest in printing and book design. His poems and fictions were often first published in limited editions by small press craftsmen.^[17]

In 1965 Davenport and Laurence Scott prepared and printed Pound's Canto CX in an edition of 118 copies, 80 of which they presented to Pound for his 80th birthday. The previous year they had produced Ezra's Bowmen of Shu on the same press, a double broadside that published for the first time, with a brief introductory essay by Davenport, a drawing by sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and a letter of Gaudier's from the trenches of World War I that cites Pound's poem (translated from one in the Shi Jing) "The Song of the Bowmen of Shu".^[18]

Many of Davenport's earlier stories are combinations of pictures and text, especially Tatlin! and Apples and Pears (where some of the illustrations are of pages that resemble those of his own notebooks).

"It was my intention, when I began writing fiction several years ago, to construct texts that were both written and drawn.... I continued this method right through Apples and Pears... The designer [of A+P] understood [my] collages to be gratuitous illustrations having nothing to do with anything, reduced them all to burnt toast, framed them with nonsensical lines, and sabotaged my whole enterprise. I took this as final defeat, and haven't tried to combine drawing and writing in any later work of fiction."^[19]

Works[link]

Fiction[link]

• Tatlin!: Six Stories (Scribner's, 1974) (with illustrations by Davenport)
• Da Vinci's Bicycle: Ten Stories (University of Chicago Press, 1979) (with illustrations by Davenport)
• Eclogues: Eight Stories (North Point Press, 1981) (two stories illustrated by Roy Behrens)
• Trois Caprices (The Pace Trust, 1981) (three stories later collected in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon)
• The Bowmen of Shu (The Grenfell Press, 1984) (limited ed., collected in Apples and Pears)
• Apples and Pears and Other Stories (North Point Press, 1984) (with illustrations by Davenport)
• The Bicycle Rider (Red Ozier Press, 1985) (limited ed., later collected—in a different version—in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon)
• Jonah: A Story (Nadja Press, 1986) (limited ed., later collected in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon)
• The Jules Verne Steam Balloon: Nine Stories (North Point Press, 1987)
• The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers (North Point Press, 1990)
• The Lark (Dim Gray Bar Press, 1993) (limited ed., illustrated by Davenport)
• A Table of Green Fields: Ten Stories (New Directions, 1993)
• The Cardiff Team: Ten Stories (New Directions, 1996)
• Twelve Stories (Counterpoint, 1997) (selections from Tatlin!, Apples and Pears, and The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers)
• The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2003) (contains seven essays [three previously uncollected] along with nineteen stories [two previously uncollected] and one play)
• Wo es war, soll ich werden: The Restored Original Text (Finial Press, 2004) (limited ed.) [1]

Translations[link]

• Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of Archilochos (University of California Press, 1964)
• Sappho: Songs and Fragments (University of Michigan Press, 1965)
• Herakleitos and Diogenes (Grey Fox Press, 1979)
• The Mimes of Herondas (Grey Fox Press, 1981)
• Maxims of the Ancient Egyptians (The Pace Trust, 1983) (from Boris de Rachewiltz's Massime degli antichi egiziani, 1954)
• Anakreon (The University of Alabama/ Parallel Editions, 1991)
• Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets (University of California Press, 1980) (adds Alkman to Carmina Archilochi and Sappho: Songs and Fragments)
• The Logia of Yeshua: The Sayings of Jesus (Counterpoint, 1996) (with Benjamin Urrutia)
• 7 Greeks (New Directions, 1995) (revises and collects the texts—but none of Davenport's drawings—from Carmina Archilochi, Sappho: Songs and Fragments, Herakleitos and Diogenes, The Mimes of Herondas, Anakreon, and Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman)

Poetry[link]

• Cydonia Florentia (The Lowell-Adams House Printers/Laurence Scott, 1966)
• Flowers and Leaves: Poema vel Sonata, Carmina Autumni Primaeque Veris Transformationem (Nantahala Foundation/Jonathan Williams, 1966; Bamberger Books, 1991) (illustrated by Davenport)
• The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard (Jordan Davies, 1982)
• Goldfinch Thistle Star (Red Ozier Press, 1983) (illustrated by Lachlan Stewart)
• Thasos and Ohio: Poems and Translations, 1950–1980 (North Point Press, 1986) (includes most of Flowers and Leaves, along with translations of six of the "7 Greeks" and of Rainer Maria Rilke and Harold Schimmel)

Fugitive pieces[link]

Davenport wrote introductions or contributions to many books:

• Jack Sharpless's Presences of Mind
• Stan Brakhage's Film Biographies
• Will McBride's Coming of Age
• Paul Cadmus's The Drawings of Paul Cadmus (1989)
• Charles Burchfield's Charles Burchfield's Seasons
• Simon Dinnerstein's Paintings and Drawings
• Anne Carson's Glass, Irony, and God
• Jonathan Williams's Palpable Elysium, Ear in Bartram's Tree, Elite/Elate Poems, and tribute to Edward Dahlberg
• Lenard D. Moore's Forever Home
• Paul Metcalf's Collected Works, Volume 1
• Jonathan Greene's tribute to Jonathan Williams, JW/50
• Daniel Haberman's Lug of Days to Come
• Burton Raffel's Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments
• James Laughlin's Man in the Wall
• Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote
• Ralph Eugene Meatyard's Father Louie and Ralph Eugene Meatyard
• Aperture's monographs on Eudora Welty's and Ralph Eugene Meatyard's photographs
• The University of Virginia's small monograph on Lafcadio Hearn, The Art of Lafcadio Hearn (1983)
• Charles L. Rubin's collection Junk Food (1980)
• Elizabeth Turner Hutton's Americans in Paris (1921–31): Man Ray, Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis, and Alexander Calder
• Riva Castleman's Art of the Forties
• Ronald Johnson's Ark: The Foundations and Valley of Many-Colored Grasses
• O. Henry's Cabbages and Kings and Selected Stories (which he also edited)
• Davenport's own selection of Louis Agassiz's scientific writings, The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz.

Some of these pieces were included in Davenport's collections of essays.

Commentary and essays[link]

• The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz (Beacon Press, 1963)
• Pennant Key-Indexed Study Guide to Homer's The Iliad (Educational Research Associates, 1967)
• Pennant Key-Indexed Study Guide to Homer's The Odyssey (Educational Research Associates, 1967)
• The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. (North Point Press, 1981)
• Cities on Hills: A Study of I – XXX of Ezra Pound's Cantos (UMI Research, 1983)
• Charles Burchfield's Seasons (Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994)
• The Drawings of Paul Cadmus (Rizzoli, 1989)
• Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays (North Point Press, 1987)
• A Balthus Notebook (The Ecco Press, 1989)
• The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Counterpoint, 1996)
• Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature (Counterpoint, 1998)

Paintings and drawings[link]

• A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport, with an essay by Erik Anderson Reece (New Directions, 1996)
• 50 Drawings (Dim Gray Bar Press, 1996) (limited ed.) Introduction by Davenport gives an account of the role drawing and painting played in his life.
• Joan Crane's Davenport bibliography (see below) includes a 25-page insert of reproductions that suggest the range of his drawing styles.
• Two books by Hugh Kenner, The Counterfeiters and The Stoic Comedians, include Davenport's crosshatched crow quill and ink work, ten full-page drawings in each.

Letters[link]

• A Garden Carried in a Pocket: Letters 1964–1968, ed. Thomas Meyer (Green Shade, 2004). Selected correspondence with Jonathan Williams
• Fragments from a Correspondence, ed. Nicholas Kilmer (ARION, Winter 2006, 89–129)
• Selected Letters: Guy Davenport and James Laughlin, ed. W. C. Bamberger (W. W. Norton, 2007)

Criticism, reviews, and interviews[link]

• Alpert, Barry (ed.). "Guy Davenport / Ronald Johnson". VORT 9, 1976.
• Bawer, Bruce. "Wise guy". Bookforum, April 2005. [2]
• Cahill, Christopher. "Prose" (The Cardiff Team and The Hunter Gracchus). Boston Review, April/May 1997.
• Cohen, Paul. "Art in the Soviet Union: Davenport's Visual Critique in 'Tatlin!'". Mosaic, 1985.
• Cozy, David. "Knowledge as Delight / the fiction of Guy Davenport", RainTaxi, Fall 2002.
• ———. "A Plain Modernist" (The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing). The Threepenny Review, Summer 2004.
• ———. "Guy Davenport". The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2005.
• Delany, Samuel R.. "The 'Gay Writer' / 'Gay Writing'...?" in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary (Wesleyan University Press, 1999).
• Dillon, Patrick. "Dimensions of Erewhon: The Modern Orpheus in Guy Davenport's 'The Dawn in Erewhon'". CUREJ: College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal (University of Pennsylvania, 2006). [3]
• Dirda, Michael. "Guy Davenport," in Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments (W.W. Norton, 2000).
• Furlani, Andre. "A Postmodern Utopia Of Childhood Sexuality: The Fiction Of Guy Davenport", in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
• ———. Guy Davenport: Postmodernism and After (Northwestern University Press, 2007).
• Kelly, Robert. Interview on Guy Davenport. The Brooklyn Rail, July 2005
• Mason, Wyatt. "There Must I Begin to Be: Guy Davenport's Heretical Fictions". Harper's Magazine, April 2004.
• Quartermain, Peter. "Writing as Assemblage^{[disambiguation needed ]} / Guy Davenport" in Disjunctive Poetics (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
• Shannon, John (ed.). "A Symposium on Guy Davenport". Margins 13, August–September 1974.
• Sullivan, John Jeremiah (Fall 2002). "Guy Davenport, The Art of Fiction No. 174". The Paris Review 163. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/355/the-art-of-fiction-no-174-guy-davenport. 
• Zachar, Laurence. "L'écriture de Guy Davenport, fragments et fractals". Lille : A.N.R.T. Université de Lille III, 1996. OCLC: 70116807. (Zachar's thesis is in French, but extensive interview material and letters appear in English in an appendix, 426–488.)

Published bibliography[link]

• Crane, Joan. Guy Davenport: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1947–1995 (Green Shade, 1996).

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• New Criterion obituary ($), Feb 2005.
• "When Novelists Become Cubists: The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport". (Style, Spring 2002)
• "Guy Davenport as Translator". (National Post, 19 August 2004.)
• A review of Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia's translation of the sayings of Jesus
• Roy R. Behrens: A Designer Remembers the Writer Guy Davenport
• "Let the Song Lie in the Thing", n+1's poem in memory of Davenport
• Charles Ralston's website on Guy Davenport
• Michael Matthew Kaylor, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde (2006), a 500-page scholarly volume that considers Davenport in its conclusion (the author has made this volume available in a free, open-access PDF version).
• "Het nieuve wereldbeeld: The Magical World of Guy Davenport" by Gilbert Purdy
• Robert Kelly and David Levi Strauss on Guy Davenport (1927—2005)

Jack Davenport
Born	(1973-03-01) 1 March 1973 (age 39) Merton, Oxfordshire, England, UK
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1996–present
Spouse	Michelle Gomez (1 May 2000–present, 1 child)

Jack Davenport (born 1 March 1973) is an English actor, best known for his roles in the television series This Life, Coupling and as James Norrington in the Pirates of the Caribbean series. He has also appeared in many other Hollywood films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley. More recently, Davenport was part of the ensemble cast of characters in the drama series FlashForward and Smash.

Personal life[link]

Davenport, the son of actors Nigel Davenport and Maria Aitken,^[1] was born in Merton, Oxfordshire and lived in Ibiza for the first seven years of his life. His uncle is writer and disgraced former Conservative Member of Parliament Jonathan Aitken, his maternal grandfather was politician William Aitken and his maternal great-grandfather was the first Baron Rugby.^[2] His parents divorced when he was seven, at which point he was sent to the independent Dragon School, a co-educational boarding school in Oxford, as his parents did not want him to become involved in the divorce proceedings. He then went on to attend the independent school Cheltenham College, followed by the British American Drama Academy. He is married to the actress Michelle Gomez who gave birth to their son, Harry, in early 2010.^[3][4]

Career[link]

Davenport had not planned to become an actor; however, his career began when he took a gap year after attending Cheltenham College. A director from Clwyd Theatr Cymru (The Welsh National Theatre) was impressed by his performance in a summer drama course and asked Davenport to work for him. At 18 years of age he ended up in Wales, performing bit parts in Hamlet, where he became friends with Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill).

The following year, he attended the University of East Anglia (UEA), concentrating in Film Studies and English Literature. He tried out acting once more at the UEA but was not, at this point, seriously interested in it. In fact, Davenport had considered becoming a member of a film crew, as opposed to acting in front of the camera. His mother advised him, after his graduation from UEA, to write to John Cleese requesting work on the set of his upcoming film, Fierce Creatures, so that Davenport could gain some real experience behind the camera. Cleese instead sent Davenport's letter to the casting department, and he was cast as a student zookeeper. Whilst a small part with very few lines it provided his first opportunity to work in front of the camera. After the production of Fierce Creatures was completed, Davenport found an agent who secured him an audition for the role of Miles Stewart in the BBC television drama series This Life.

Since then Davenport has played roles in many successful films and TV series, including The Talented Mr. Ripley, Coupling, and Ultraviolet, as well as the box office smash Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and its sequels, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

During his career Davenport has also performed voice-overs, having narrated the audio versions of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps and recorded parts in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. He also provides the voice over for the British MasterCard advertisements (the American being done by Billy Crudup).

In 2006, he featured in the ITV1 drama The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant and in 2009 starred in the film The Boat That Rocked.

In 2007 Davenport was cast in Swingtown (2008), a period and relationship drama for CBS about the impact of sexual and social liberation in 1970s American suburban households, with story arcs involving open marriages and key parties. This was cancelled after its only season.

In 2008, Davenport was cast in the new ABC pilot FlashForward (2009–10), which was based on a Robert J. Sawyer novel. In the series, Davenport played the character of Lloyd Simcoe, a physicist allegedly responsible for a worldwide blackout, which causes the whole world to see the future. That series was also cancelled after a single season.

In February 2011, Davenport was cast in the NBC musical drama pilot Smash.^[5] In May 2011, it was reported that NBC has picked up the show as a series for the autumn 2011 TV season.^[6] The series follows a group of people coming together to put on a Marilyn Monroe musical on Broadway. Davenport plays the musical's director.

Davenport also starred as the replacement singer in the video for Snow Patrol's new single Called Out in the Dark, released on YouTube on 17 August 2011, alongside Tara Summers and Gary Lightbody.^[7] .

Filmography[link]

Television appearances

Radio[link]

• Alistair Cooke's American Journey (2006) (reading the veteran journalist's wartime reports for BBC Radio 4)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jack Davenport

• Jack Davenport at the Internet Movie Database

Larry the Cable Guy
Larry on June 10, 2007
Birth name	Daniel Lawrence Whitney
Born	(1963-02-17) February 17, 1963 (age 49) Pawnee City, Nebraska
Medium	Stand-up Television Film Radio Books
Nationality	American
Years active	1991–present
Genres	Character comedy, redneck comedy, country comedy, observational comedy, satire
Subject(s)	Culture of the Southern United States, obesity, human sexuality, political correctness, self-deprecation, family, personal hygiene
Influences	Steve Martin,[1] Don Rickles,[1] Milton Berle,[1] Henny Youngman,[1] Jeff Foxworthy, Charlie Callas
Influenced	Billy the Bass Man
Spouse	Cara James (2005–present; 2 children)
Notable works and roles	Blue Collar Comedy Tour Larry McCoy in Delta Farce Himself in Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector Larry in Witless Protection Mater in Cars and Cars 2
Website	Official site

Daniel Lawrence Whitney^[1] (born February 17, 1963), best known by his stage name and character Larry the Cable Guy, is an American stand-up comedian, actor, country music artist, voice artist, and former radio personality.^[2]

He is one of the members of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, a comedy troupe which also includes Bill Engvall, Ron White, and Jeff Foxworthy (with whom he has starred on Blue Collar TV).

Whitney has released seven comedy albums, of which three have been certified gold by the RIAA for shipments of 500,000 copies. In addition, he has starred in three Blue Collar Comedy Tour-related movies, as well as in the films Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, Delta Farce, and Witless Protection. He is widely known for voicing Mater in the Cars franchise. Whitney's catchphrase "Git-R-Done!" is also the title of his book.

On January 26, 2010, the TV channel History announced that it was ordering a series starring Whitney called Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy, in which he would explore the country and immerse himself in different lifestyles, jobs, and hobbies.^[3] The first episode of the series aired on February 8, 2011.^[4]

Early life[link]

According to a CMT biography, Whitney grew up on a pig farm in Pawnee City, Nebraska.^[5] He went to college at the now defunct Baptist University of America.^[6] He credits his roommates from Texas and Georgia for inspiring his imitation Southern accent.^[7] He dropped out after his junior year after trying his hand at comedy.^[7]

Career[link]

Radio career[link]

Whitney started his career in radio as a disc jockey in Blue Springs, Missouri. He became known in the early 1990s when he made regular radio appearances via phone on programs such as The Ron and Ron Show, The Chris Baker Show on KOOO and KEZO's The Todd and Tyler Show in Omaha, Nebraska, as well as the Kirk, Mark, and Lopez morning show on WIYY in Baltimore, Maryland. He was also a frequent guest on the The Johnny Dare Morning Show show on 98.9, KQRC, Kansas City. He also did appearances on WJRR in Orlando, Florida, on the Monsters in the Mid Day (presently the Monsters in the Morning), as he was a personal friend of BlackBean (Carlos Navarro) with whom he had done voice-over work. He was brought to New England on Greg and the Morning Buzz on WHEB 100.3 and WGIR 101.1 in Portsmouth and Manchester, New Hampshire, respectively, doing two commentaries a week.

Stand-up career[link]

He became famous developing the Larry character, a personality that he now maintains throughout his stage act. The Larry character has a stereotypical redneck appearance and a thick Southern accent, recounts stories about his "family," and uses, among other common expressions, his own catchphrase "Git-R-Done!" A part of Whitney's routine is his affected Southern accent. He says in interviews and in his autobiographical book GIT-R-DONE that he deliberately "turns on" the accent both on and off stage, because he may forget it if he kept his normal accent intact.^[8] He uses catchphrase humor, including "Git-R-Done", "Lord, I apologize, and be with the starvin' Pygmies down there in New Guinea. Amen." and "I don't care who ya are, that's funny right there" after certain jokes. He appears in Nutrisystem commercials with Dan Marino. Marino delivers the catchphrase "Git-R-Done", and is shown dressed in Whitney's trademark attire, including a pair of jeans, a cut-off, untucked flannel shirt, and camouflage hat.

His first two comedy albums, Lord, I Apologize (2001) and The Right to Bare Arms (2005), have both been certified gold by the RIAA. A third album, Morning Constitutions, and its accompanying TV special were released in 2007.

Other work[link]

In 2006, he was approached by Comedy Central to voice a character for an as-yet-unnamed animated series. The show would involve his character as one of two owners of a small cable channel (the other, a high-classed, high-attitude woman). A half-hour pilot was ordered by the network, but has yet to air.^[9]

Whitney was roasted in a Comedy Central special on March 15, 2009.^[10] During the roast, he can be heard greeting roasters out of character and in his normal speaking voice, as well as being called "Dan" by Bill Engvall.^{[citation needed]}

On Tuesday, February 8, 2011, the première of his newest travelogue series, Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy, was broadcast on the History Channel. A total of 4.1 million viewers, 1.7 million adults 25–54, tuned in, nearly doubling the total for the "Top Shot" season 2 opener.^[11] During season two in the episode "Larry Goes To Washington", Larry was the first on-air talent from a non news crew allowed in the War Room, also known as the Command Center, as he explained during the program.

A company in North Dakota developed a line of Larry the Cable Guy food products, such as boxed hamburger dinners. It is sold in Big Lots stores, and the packaging states proceeds from sales benefit his "Git-R-Done Foundation".

Personal life[link]

Whitney resides in Lincoln, Nebraska. He married his wife Cara in 2005. They have two children together, a son, Wyatt (born August 2006), and a daughter, Reagan (born October 2007). In 2010, Whitney and his wife disclosed in an article that their son Wyatt has hip dysplasia.^[12]

His home town of Pawnee City, Nebraska has a street named after him. Whitney also donated money to buy new theatrical equipment for the local high school.^[13]

He is an avid Nebraska Cornhuskers fan and his signature camouflage hat has the Nebraska "N" emblazoned on it.^{[citation needed]}

In September 2010, Dan donated $5 Million to the Arnold Palmer Hospital in Orlando, Florida. The huge gift was for further development of the International Hip Dysplasia Institute at the Orlando hospital. After Dr. Chad Price at Arnold Palmer Hospital helped cure their son, Wyatt of his dysplasia when he was an infant, Whitney and his wife, Cara, made private donations to the hospital and Whitney raised money through appearances on "Family Feud" and "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" The Hospital Opened a new wing called the "Wyatt Whitney Wing" of the hospital. The construction was complete in May 2012.^[14]

Radio shows[link]

Whitney was a radio personality on:

• KKAR 1290 AM in Omaha, Nebraska
• KGDE 101.9 The Edge in Omaha, Nebraska
• KEZO "Z-92" in Omaha, Nebraska
• KQRC 98.9 FM "The Rock" in Kansas City
• KMYZ "Z104.5 The Edge" in Tulsa, Oklahoma
• WYNF 94.9 FM "95YNF" in Tampa, Florida
• WJRR 101One in Orlando, Florida
• WDIZ in Panama City, Florida
• WPLA "Planet Radio" 107.3 in Jacksonville, Florida
• WIYY 97.9 "98 Rock" in Baltimore, Maryland
• WPYX in Albany, New York
• WHEB in Portsmouth, New Hampshire
• KTPI-FM in Tehachapi, California
• WPBZ 103.1 "The Buzz" in West Palm Beach, Florida
• Blue Collar Radio on Sirius XM Radio

Discography[link]

Filmography[link]

• Larry the Cable Guy: Git-R-Done (2003)
• Blue Collar Comedy Tour: The Movie (2003)
• Blue Collar Comedy Tour: Rides Again (2004)
• Blue Collar TV (2004–2006) as Various Characters
• Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector (2006)
• Cars (2006) as Mater
• Blue Collar Comedy Tour: One For the Road (2006)
• Delta Farce (2007) as Larry
• Witless Protection (2008) as Deputy Larry Stalder
• Cars Toons: Mater's Tall Tales (2008–2011) as Mater
• Comedy Central Roast (2009)
• Larry the Cable Guy's Hula-Palooza Christmas Luau (2009)
• Larry the Cable Guy: Tailgate Party (2010)
• Cars 2 (2011) as Mater
• Tooth Fairy 2 (2012) as Larry Guthrie

References[link]