Scott Spencer (author)

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

Endless Love (by Franco Zeffirelli in 1981) and Waking the Dead (by Jodie Foster and Keith Gordon in 2000) have both been made into films. The former was directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and the latter was produced by Jodie Foster and directed by Keith Gordon.

Spencer has also worked as a journalist. His work has appeared 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, and Williams College. 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.

Spencer's most recent novel is titled Willing and was released on March 11, 2008.

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

Tom Cruise made his film debut as a bit player in Endless Love.