Eric Larsen

Eric Larsen was born in Northfield, Minnesota, where, after attending the public schools, he graduated from Carleton College in 1963. He took an M.A. in English from the University of Iowa and in 1971 completed his Ph.D. there, with Robert Scholes as one of his faculty advisors. For his dissertation, under the direction of William Cotter Murray, he wrote a volume of original stories accompanied by his own critical commentaries.

In 1971, after living abroad for two years, Larsen joined the English Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and remained there until his retirement in early 2006. He is married to the editor Anne Larsen. The couple have two grown daughters.

Larsen published stories and essays in quarterlies and magazines throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and in 1988 Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill brought out his novel 'An American Memory,' which became the winner of the Chicago Tribune's inaugural Heartland Prize for the year's best novel of or about the middle west.

In 1992, Algonquin published 'I Am Zoe Handke,' a novel complementing and advancing several of the elements and themes of 'An American Memory.' Changes in the national mood, in reading habits, in academics, and in popular taste from the early 1990s on brought about a situation whereby Larsen's third and fourth novels ('The End of the 19th Century' and 'The Decline and Fall of the American Nation') came out not from Algonquin but from The Oliver Arts & Open Press. In spring 2006, Shoemaker & Hoard published Larsen's book of political and cultural criticism, 'A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit.'