Chuck Kinder

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Charles Alfonso Kinder, II (born 1946) is an American novelist.

Chuck Kinder was born October 8 in Montgomery, West Virginia to Charles Alfonso and Eileen Reba (Parsons) Kinder. He was educated at West Virginia University (BA, MA) and Stanford University. Kinder has taught at Waynesburg College and Stanford, and at the University of Pittsburgh since 1980, where he is currently a professor of English and Director of the Writing Program.

At Stanford Kinder became close friends with fellow students Raymond Carver, Larry McMurtry, and Scott Turow. His relationship with Carver inspired his novel 2001 Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale, which for nearly twenty years had vexed Kinder and had grown, uncontrollably, into a sprawling manuscript of over 3,000 pages at one point. Kinder's struggle with this manuscript was local legend at the University of Pittsburgh. Michael Chabon, once an undergraduate student of Kinder's, used it as inspiration for the character Grady Tripp in the 1995 novel Wonder Boys, while Robert Clark Young, who met Kinder through Raymond Carver, satirized Kinder's struggle with the 3,000-page manuscript in the prize-winning essay One Writer’s Big Innings.

Kinder is married to Diane Cecily Blackmer. They reside in Pittsburgh.

[edit] Works

Snakehunter, a novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973)
The Silver Ghost, a novel (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979)
Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale, a novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001)
Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life, creative nonfiction (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004)