Stephen Wright Books in Order

Stephen Wright was born in Warren, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He has said he wanted to write fiction from the time he was eight or nine, long before he had any clear route into a writing life.

He attended Ohio State University in the 1960s, where an undergraduate writing class helped keep that interest alive. Then he was drafted and served in Army intelligence during the Vietnam War.

Writing had to wait. Wright later recalled that, while in Vietnam, he wrote little beyond a few letters because simply keeping himself together took all his attention.

After returning home, he went back to Ohio State to study English, then left for the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He arrived there with material he knew mattered to him, but without an easy answer for how to shape it into fiction. The workshop became the place where he worked through that problem and began building his first novel.

That book was Meditations in Green, published in 1983. It follows Army intelligence specialist James Griffin through Vietnam and into the troubled civilian life that follows, moving through war, addiction, memory, and the natural world. Wright used plant imagery to connect the jungle, defoliation, drugs, and the damage left behind by the conflict.

The novel won the Maxwell Perkins Prize for a promising first novel.

Wright did not settle into one kind of story after that. M31: A Family Romance centers on Dash and Dot, traveling UFO lecturers whose unusual household lives in a decommissioned Midwestern church. Going Native sends suburban husband and father Wylie Jones on a violent, increasingly unreal trip across America. In The Amalgamation Polka, Liberty Fish enters the Civil War while trying to reckon with a family split between Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders. Processed Cheese follows Graveyard and Ambience after a bag of cash drops into their lives, with trouble close behind.

His novels often put ordinary wants, money, family, belonging, escape, against situations that turn strange or dangerous fast. The settings may shift from Vietnam to roadside America to the Civil War, but the people in them are often trying to find solid ground in a world that has stopped making sense.

Wright has received a Whiting Award in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He has taught writing and literature at Iowa, Goucher College, Princeton, Brown, and The New School, and lives in New York City.