Tom Drury
American writer
Tom Drury (born 1956) is an American novelist and the author of The End of Vandalism. He was included in the 1996 Granta issue of "The Best of Young American Novelists" and has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, and the MacDowell Fellowship. His short stories have been serialized in The New Yorker and his essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, North American Review, and Mississippi Review.
His fiction, set in the American midwest, has been described by The Guardian as having "a kind of dislocation; a 1950s or 60s sensibility dropped into a 90s social landscape." In 2015, The Guardian called him "an overlooked giant of American comic fiction." The Independent compared him to Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, and called him "the greatest writer you've never heard of . . . a cult figure, the new Richard Yates", writing: "His anonymity is a literary tragedy."
He has taught writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Yale University, Wesleyan University, Florida State University, and La Salle University.
Background and education
Drury was born in Iowa, in 1956, and grew up in Swaledale, which he remembers as more lively than it was in 2015: it had "a gas station, hair salon, grocery, grain elevator, hardware store, two taverns, three churches, eventually a library. Now there's an auto mechanic, a church and the library. The old hardware store is used to store doors." Even then it was an isolated place, and the bookmobile provided the first glimpse of different lives.
He received his bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Iowa in 1980 and his MFA in creative writing at Brown University in 1987, where he studied with Robert Coover.
Career
Journalism
Drury worked at the Danbury News-Times, the Litchfield County Times, and The Providence Journal.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tom Drury” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.