Scott Spencer (author)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Scott Spencer (born September 1, 1945, in Washington, D.C.) is an American author who has written eight novels. They are Last Night at the Brain Thieves’ Ball (1973), Preservation Hall (1976), Endless Love (1979), Waking the Dead (1986), Secret Anniversaries (1990), Men in Black (1995), The Rich Man’s Table (1998), and A Ship Made of Paper (2003). 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…” Endless Love and Waking the Dead have both been made into films. The former was directed by Franco Zeffereli, and the latter was produced by Jodie Foster and directred by Keith Gordon.(Little known fact: in a scene in the movie "Waking the Dead" Spencer appears in a street scene, walking with Jennifer Connelly. When another character shouts out at them, he glares at the camera.)
Spencer has also worked as a journalist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, and he is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone. He has taught at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, and Williams College. 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.
