Steven Millhauser Biography

American novelist, born in New York City, educated at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Millhauser worked as a copywriter in New York before attending Brown University where he studied Medieval and Renaissance Literature. He came to critical attention in 1972 with the publication of his first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright which, like much contemporary American post-modernist fiction, wilfully breaks down the traditional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, biography, and autobiography. Millhauser's writings have been compared with those of Nabokov and a Nabokovian playfulness and invention is to be found in later writings such as Portrait of a Romantic (1977), the novella In the Penny Arcade (1985), From the Realm of Morpheus (1986), The Barnum Museum (1990), a volume of stories, and Little Kingdoms: Three Novellas (1993).