VJ Books presents Scott Spencer!

Scott Spencer was born in Washington, D.C. on September 1, 1945 and was raised in Chicago. He is the author of ten novels, including Endless Love, Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball, Preservation Hall, Secret Anniversaries, Men in Black, Rich Man's Table, Waking the Dead, A Ship Made of Paper, Willing and Man in the Woods.  (The Men in Black movies are not based upon Spencer's novel Men in Black.)

 

He has taught at the University of Iowa, Williams College, and Columbia University. His nonfiction has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, O, Harper's, and The New York Times.

 

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." 

 

Two of Spencer's novels, Endless Love and Waking the Dead, have been adapted into films. The first was directed by Franco Zeffirelli in 1981; the second was produced by Jodie Foster and directed by Keith Gordon in 2000.  Spencer has also worked as a journalist. 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.