Joseph McElroy

McElroy was born on August 21, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Brooklyn Heights. He graduated from Poly Prep Country Day School in 1947 and was given an Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award in 2007 from the school's Board of Governors. He graduated from Williams College in 1951. The following year, McElroy earned a master's degree from Columbia University. He served in the Coast Guard from 1952 to 1954, and then returned to Columbia to complete his Ph.D. in 1961. In 1961, McElroy married Joan Leftwich, of London, in London. She is the daughter of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews; her father, Joseph Leftwich, was a translator and anthologizer of Yiddish poetry. They have a daughter. == Career ==

McElroy taught English and Creative Writing at the University of New Hampshire from 1956 to 1962 McElroy's writing is often grouped with that of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, due to the encyclopedic quality of his novels, especially Women and Men (1987). His short fiction was first published in literary journals. Echoes of McElroy's work can be found in that of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. McElroy's work often reflects a preoccupation with how science functions in American society; Exponential, a collection of essays published in Italy in 2003, collects science and technology journalism written primarily in the 1970s and 1980s for the New York Review of Books. In 1980, McElroy and his class at Queens College interviewed Norman Mailer. He interviewed Harry Mathews in 2002 for the Village Voice. McElroy wrote about his fiction and influences in his essay "Neural Neighborhoods". == Honors and awards ==

• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Fiction, 1976 • American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, 1977 • Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship • Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship, twice • National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, twice == Published works ==

Novels • ''A Smuggler's Bible'', Harcourt Brace, 368 pages, 1966. • ''Hind's Kidnap: A Pastoral on Familiar Airs'', Harper and Row, 534 pages, 1969. • Ancient History: A Paraphase, Knopf, 307 pages, 1971. • Lookout Cartridge, Knopf, 531 pages, 1974. • Plus, Knopf, 215 pages, 1977. • Women and Men, Knopf, 1192 pages, 1987. • The Letter Left to Me, Knopf, 151 pages, 1988. • Actress in the House, Overlook, 432 pages, 2003. • Cannonball, Dzanc Books, 312 pages, 2013. Short stories • The Accident, New American Review, Number 2, January 1968. • Ship Rock: A Place, William B. Ewert, Concord, New Hampshire, limited edition, 42 pages, 1980 • republished as a chapter in Women and Men, 1987 • Preparations for Search 1984 • revised and printed as a chapbook, by Small Anchor Press, 2010 • Night Soul and Other Stories, Dalkey Archive Press, 304 pages, 2011. • Taken From Him, Kindle Singles, 2014. • Essays • Exponential (2003; published in Italy) • "Neural Neighborhoods and Other Concrete Abstracts" (1974) == References ==