Steven Millhauser

Steven Millhauser
Born	August 3, 1943 (1943-08-03) New York City, New York
Occupation	novelist, short story writer
Nationality	American
Influences Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett

Steven Millhauser (born August 3, 1943) is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Martin Dressler. The prize brought many of his older books back into print.

Life and career

Millhauser was born in New York City, grew up in Connecticut, and earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965. He then pursued a doctorate in English at Brown University. He never completed his dissertation but wrote parts of Edwin Mullhouse and From the Realm of Morpheus in two separate stays at Brown. Between times at the university, he wrote Portrait of a Romantic at his parents' house in Connecticut. His story "The Invention of Robert Herendeen" (in The Barnum Museum) features a failed student who has moved back in with his parents; the story is loosely based on this period of Millhauser's life.

Until the Pulitzer Prize, Millhauser was best known for his 1972 debut novel, Edwin Mullhouse. This novel, about a precocious writer whose career ends abruptly with his death at age eleven, features the fictional Jeffrey Cartwright playing Boswell to Edwin's Johnson. Edwin Mullhouse brought critical acclaim, and Millhauser followed with a second novel, Portrait of a Romantic, in 1977, and his first collection of short stories, In The Penny Arcade, in 1986.

Possibly the most well-known of his short stories is "Eisenheim the Illusionist", based on a pseudo-mythical tale of a magician who stunned audiences in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century. It was made into the film, The Illusionist (2006). Although the film is not entirely true to Millhauser's work, the same could be said about Millhauser's adaptation of the original tale; both adaptations romanticize the rumored magical feats. Millhauser is the only critically renowned author to have explored the extraordinary tale of Eisenheim the Magician, which, while being entirely implausible, was nevertheless believed by his huge audiences at the time, who claimed that Eisenheim created spirits in front of audiences nightly.

Millhauser's stories often treat fantasy themes in a manner reminiscent of Poe or Borges, with a distinctively American voice. As critic Russell Potter has noted, "in (Millhauser's stories), mechanical cowboys at penny arcades come to life; curious amusement parks, museums, or catacombs beckon with secret passageways and walking automata; dreamers dream and children fly out their windows at night on magic carpets."

Millhauser's collections of stories continued with The Barnum Museum (1990), Little Kingdoms (1993), and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998). The unexpected success of Martin Dressler in 1997 brought Millhauser increased attention. Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories made the New York Times Book Review list of "10 Best Books of 2008" .

Millhauser lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and teaches at Skidmore College.

Published works

• Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972) ISBN 0-679-76652-9
• Portrait of a Romantic (1977) ISBN 0-671-63089-X
• In the Penny Arcade (1986) ISBN 1-56478-182-8
• From the Realm of Morpheus (1986) ISBN 0-688-06501-5
• The Barnum Museum (1990) ISBN 1-56478-179-8
• Little Kingdoms (1993) ISBN 0-375-70143-5
• Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996) ISBN 0-517-70319-X
• The Knife Thrower (1998) ISBN 0-679-78163-3
• Enchanted Night (1999) ISBN 0-375-70696-8
• The King in the Tree (2003) ISBN 0-375-41540-8
• Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories (2008) ISBN 0-307-26756-3
• We Others: New and Selected Stories (2011) ISBN 0-307-59590-0

External links

• Interview conducted by Jim Shepard for BOMB Magazine
• Steven Millhauser at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Steven Millhauser at the Internet Movie Database
• Excerpt from Enchanted Night