Joseph McElroy


Joseph Prince McElroy is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

Personal background

Joseph McElroy was born on August 21, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Joseph Prince and Louise McElroy. McElroy's father was a scholarship student to Harvard University who majored in chemistry, but later worked as a stockbroker. He died when McElroy was 15 years old.
McElroy 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, he 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. The McElroys' only child, Hanna, was born in 1967. McElroy assisted with the birth.

Career

McElroy taught English and Creative Writing at the University of New Hampshire from 1956 to 1962 and at Queens College, City University of New York from 1964 to 1995, when he retired.
McElroy's first novel, "A Smuggler's Bible," published in 1966, remains a fixture on early postmodern reading lists for its fragmented-voice telling of eight autobiographical manuscripts of the same life. McElroy said "A Smuggler's Bible" "is like everybody's first novel, trying to put too much between covers....I

Honors and awards

Novels

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