Eric Larsen was born in 1941, in Northfield, Minnesota, where, after attending the public schools, he graduated from Carleton College in 1963. He completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa in 1971.

That same year, after living abroad for two years, Larsen joined the English Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and remained there until his retirement in early 2006.

Larsen published stories and essays throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1988, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill brought out his novel An American Memory, which won the Chicago Tribune’s first Heartland Prize for best novel of the year of or about the American middle west.

In 1992, Algonquin published I Am Zoë Handke, a novel that complemented An American Memory. Changes in the national mood, reading habits, academia, and public taste from the early 1990s on brought about a situation whereby Larsen’s third and fourth novels, making a tetralogy, remain unpublished. In 2006, he published A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit, decrying the state of the nation politically and culturally. Read about it and the other books at http://www.ericlarsen.net