Charles Baxter

Author

Charles Baxter is the author of six collections of short stories, including There’s Something I Want You to Do, which was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2016; Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (2011), The Soul Thief (2008), and Saul and Patsy (2003). He has edited the stories of Sherwood Anderson, published by the Library of America in 2012. He received the Award of Merit in the Short Story in 2007 and the Award in Literature in 1997 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Rea Award in the Short Story in 2012. His stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories seven times and in The Pushcart Prize Anthology eleven times, and they have been translated into many languages. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, among other journals and magazinesHe has also published six novels, including The Sun Collective (2020) and The Feast of Love, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000 and was made into a film starring Morgan Freeman. He has also published essays on fiction collected in Burning Down the House and Beyond Plot and edited or co-edited several books of essays: The Business of Memory, Bringing the Devil to His Knees, and A William Maxwell Portrait. He was born in Minneapolis in 1947, graduated from Macalester College with a BA in 1969 and from the State University of New York at Buffalo with a PhD in 1974, and lived for many years in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was the Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota and also taught at Wayne State University, the University of Michigan, Stanford, and the University of Iowa. He now lives in Minneapolis.