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ChatChat - Claudia Cragg


Oct 3, 2010

Scott Spencer is an author of many novels who has worked as a journalist publishing in the The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, GQ, O, The Oprah Magazine, and he is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone. He has taught at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, Williams College and The Bard Prison Project. He is an alumnus of Roosevelt University and in 2004 was the recipient of a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship. For the past twenty years, he has lived in a small town in the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York.

Spencer's best known novels are probably 'Endless Love' and 'A Ship Made of Paper. Both were nominated in the States for the National Book Award and the first sold more than two million copies and was made into a movie in 1981 by director Franco Zeffirelli. 'Waking The Dead' was also made into a film in 2000 produced by Jodie Foster and directed by Keith Gordon. *

Of 'A Ship Made of Paper', fellow writer Joyce Carol Oates gushed "Like Cheever, Spencer has imagined for his... infatuated lover melodramatic crises that verge on the surreal; like John Updike, Spencer is a poet-celebrant of Eros, lyrically precise in his descriptions of lovers' fantasies, lovers' lovemaking, lovers' bodies..."

The Wall Street Journal has written of Scott Spencer that "There are few novelists alive who use the English language as Spencer does... Every ache of feeling, every failed effort at restraint, every attempt at self-deception is captured in precise, beautifully cadenced prose."

* (n.b. Spencer's novel 'Men in Black' is not connected in any way with the Men in Black movies of that name).