About Eric Larsen

Born in Northfield, Minnesota, Eric Larsen graduated from Carleton College in 1963 and took his doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1970. For thirty-five years, he taught English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, retiring in 2006. His first novel, An American Memory (1988), was winner of the Chicago Tribune’s inaugural Heartland Prize, awarded for the year’s best novel from or about the Middle West. An American Memory was followed by three other novels—I Am Zoë Handke; The End of the 19th Century; and The Decline & Fall of the American Nation—these joined in 2023 by The Book of Reading to complete a saga of family and nation.

For 54 years, Larsen was married to the editor Anne Larsen, and the couple raised two daughters, Flynn and Gavin, both active and highly productive in the arts. Larsen lives in New York City and is author also of the three non-fiction works A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit; The Skull of Yorick: The Emptiness of American Thinking at a Time of Grave Peril—Studies in the Cover-up of 9/11; and Homer Whole: A Reading of the Iliad.