T. Coraghessan Boyle

A faithful chronicler of Baby Boomer angst in his fiction, and one of the greatest writers to come out of the famous Iowa Writer's Workshop in the early '70s, T. C. Boyle is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Born in New York but a Californian for the past few decades, Boyle may very well be the most popular black humorist in the U. S. since Flannery O'Connor. Boyle has written 11 novels – his first was Water Music in 1982 – and eight short story collections. While his novels have won many awards, including the PEN/Faulkner award for World's End in 1987, his short stories are even more celebrated than his novels. Wikipedia calls him "one of America's most accomplished short story writers."   Boyle himself greatly admires the short fiction of John Cheever.

The awkward, hilarious interplay of man and nature is one of Boyle's favorite themes, and he possesses an uncanny knack for making the reader feel for and relate to any of his characters--heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses.  A little-known fact about Boyle that would surprise fans of his cutting-edge, starkly modern fiction is that he earned his Ph.D. in Victorian literature.  However, Boyle is very much the literary heir of great American social commentators of the 19th century, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain.

"What Boyle does, and does well, is lay on the line our national cult of hypocrisy."