Steven Millhauser

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Steven Millhauser (born 3 August 1943 in New York City) 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.

Millhauser grew up in Connecticut and received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965, 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 his times at the university, he wrote Portrait of a Romantic at his parents' house in Connecticut. For his stay there for many years, see the story "The Invention of Robert Herendeen" in the collection The Barnum Museum.

Until the Pulitzer, Millhauser was best known for Edwin Mullhouse (Knopf, 1972). This novel, in which the fictional Cartwright plays Boswell to Edwin's Johnson, a writer whose career ends abruptly with his death at age eleven, brought critical acclaim. Millhauser followed Edwin Mullhouse with Portrait of a Romantic (1977) and his first collection of short stories, In The Penny Arcade, in 1986. Millhauser's stories often treated fantasy themes in a manner reminiscent of Poe or Borges, but with a distinctively American voice. In them mechanical cowboys at penny arcades came to life; curious amusement parks, museums, or catacombs beckoned with secret passageways and walking automata; dreamers dreamed dreams and children flew out their windows at night on magic carpets.

Millhauser's collections 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. In 2006, the film The Illusionist, based on Millhauser's short story "Eisenheim the Illusionist", was released. It was directed by Neil Burger and stars Paul Giamatti and Edward Norton.

Millhauser's fiction often addresses the theme of a system that elaborates itself until it collapses or reaches some crucial turning point. "Eisenheim the Illusionist," for example, follows the fictional history of ever-more-elaborate magic shows in Vienna, shows that eventually become untenable. In the end, the most successful magician reinvents his act along minimalist lines. In another story, "The Dome," Millhauser tells the story of the invention artificial domes that cover houses. Eventually these become more elaborate, covering whole towns and cities and, eventually, the nation. In other fiction he has treated such things as fashion and retail as systems or discourses that grow more and more elaborate, sometimes being reinvented along more minimalist lines after achieving baroque complexity.

Two more recent short stories, "History of a Disturbance" in the March 2007 New Yorker and "The Wizard of West Orange" in the April 2007 Harper's Magazine, address Buddhist themes.

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