Scott Spencer (author)

Scott Spencer (born September 1, 1945, in Washington, D.C.) is an American author who has written ten novels.

Endless Love and A Ship Made of Paper have both been nominated for the National Book Award. Endless Love has sold over 2 million copies.

Interviewed in The New York Times, Spencer once said, "It may be time for serious, literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies." Joyce Carol Oates, writing about A Ship Made of Paper in The New Yorker, said, "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 said, "There are few novelists alive who use the English language as Scott Spencer does... Every ache of feeling, every failed effort at restraint, every attempt at self-deception is captured in precise, beautifully cadenced prose."

Two of Spencer's novels, Endless Love and Waking the Dead, have been adapted into films. The first was directed by Franco Zeffirelli in 1981; the second was produced by Jodie Foster and directed by Keith Gordon in 2000.

Spencer has also worked as a journalist. He has published in 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 Bard College's Bard Prison Initiative. Spencer is an alumnus of Roosevelt University. In 2004, he was the recipient of a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship. For the past twenty years, he has lived in a small town in upstate New York.

The Men in Black movies are not based upon Spencer's novel Men in Black.

List of works

Scott Spencer's Novels (in order of release):

• Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball (1975)
• Preservation Hall (1976)
• Endless Love (1979)
• Waking the Dead (1986)
• Secret Anniversaries (1990)
• Men In Black (1995)
• Rich Man's Table (1998)
• A Ship Made of Paper (2003)
• Willing (2008)
• Man in the Woods (2010)

References

• "Novelist Scott Spencer". Fresh Air. National Public Radio. WHYY. June 20, 2003.
• "Scott Spencer: Turning Orderly Lives Into Chaos". Fresh Air. National Public Radio. WHYY. September 15, 2010. Transcript.

External links

• 1986 audio interview with Scott Spencer at Wired for Books.org by Don Swaim
• Scott Spencer's page @ Harper Collins
• Scott Spencer at the Internet Movie Database
• Audio interview with Scott Spencer, and first chapter of Willing on National Public Radio (NPR) radio program Fresh Air - March 19, 2008
• [1] 25 August 2010 audio interview with KGNU radio's Claudia Cragg