Richard G. Stern
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American writer and educator, Richard G. Stern was born in New York City in 1928. He attended the University of North Carolina from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in 1944. After a year working in Indiana, Florida and New York City, he went to Harvard University where he received an MA in English Literature.
In 1949, he taught as a Fulbright Scholar in Versailles, France. From 1950-51 he was an assistant professor and taught at Heidelberg University. From 1952-54, he was a member of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and received a PHD from the University of Iowa in 1954. After a year teaching at Connecticut College in New London, he came to the University of Chicago where he taught from 1955-2002. He retired as Helen A Regenstein Professor of English and American Literature in 2004.
In 1960, Stern published his first novel, Golk' then the novels: Europe or Up and Down with Baggish and Schreiber (1961); In Any Case (1962); Stitch (1965); Other Mens' Daughters (1973); Natural Shocks (1978); A Father's Words (1986),and Pacific Tremors (2001). There also have been short story collections culminating in his collected stories, Almonds to Zhoof published in 2004, his 21st book. Of this last book, a reviewer in the New Republic, called Stern "the best American author of whom you have never heard." This indeed has been the tag associated with Mr. Stern for the last quarter of a century. "I was a has-been before I'd been a been," was a well-known self-deprecation as was the word of Richard Schickel that Mr. Stern "was almost famous for not being famous." Stern has also published his collected essays in What is What Was, which demonstrates that his astute observations in fiction are equal to, and derived from, his acute views on news and culture.
In 1985, Stern received the Medal of Merit for the Novel, awarded to a novelist every 6 years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his many other awards was the Heartland Award for the best work of non-fiction which Stern received for his memoir, Sistermony, published in 1995.
Stern continues to write and his books remain in print through Northwestern University Press and University of Chicago Press.
The most recent book about Stern and his work was published in 2001: The Writings of Richard Stern: The Education of an Intellectual Everyman, David Garrett Izzo, McFarland Publishing.