Andre Dubus III (born 1959) is an American novelist and writer of short stories. He is a member of the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
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Son of the Louisiana-born writer Andre Dubus, Andre Dubus III grew up in mill towns in the Merrimack River valley along the Massachusetts - New Hampshire border. He began writing fiction at age 22 just a few months after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelors Degree in sociology. Because he preferred to write in the morning, going from "the dream world to the dream world", as the Irish writer Edna O'Brien puts it, he took mainly night jobs: bartender, office cleaner, halfway house counselor, and for six months worked as an assistant to a private investigator/bounty hunter. Over the years he has also worked as a self-employed carpenter and college writing teacher.[1]
Dubus' novel House of Sand and Fog (1999) was a finalist for the National Book Award[2] and the basis for an Academy award-nominated film.[3] His 2011 memoir Townie tells of growing up poor in Haverhill after his parents' divorce, street fighting, and eventually boxing, and deals extensively with his relationship with his father.
A member of PEN American Center, Andre Dubus III has served as a panelist for The National Book Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and has taught writing at Harvard University, Tufts University, Emerson College, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell where he is a full-time faculty member.
Dubus' work has been included in The Best American Essays of 1994, The Best Spiritual Writing of 1999, and The Best of Hope Magazine. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for fiction, The Pushcart Prize, and was a Finalist for the Rome Prize Fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters. Dubus's novel House of Sand and Fog was a fiction finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Booksense Book of the Year, and was an Oprah Book Club Selection and #1 New York Times bestseller. It has been published in twenty languages and the 2003 film adaptation directed by Vadim Perelman was nominated for an academy award.
Dubus is married to performer Fontaine Dollas Dubus. They reside in Newburyport, Massachusetts with their three children.
Andre Dubus III's aunt is the novelist Elizabeth Nell Dubus, mother of DeLaune Michel, also a novelist. His first cousin, once removed, is the acclaimed writer James Lee Burke, author of over thirty novels and short story collections and two-time winner of the Edgar Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year. James Lee Burke’s youngest daughter is the novelist Alafair Burke.