Grouse County Trilogy: Tom Drury Reads From His Work

Tom Drury is the author of five novels and numerous short stories and essays. A native of Iowa, he confronts his readers with the intricacies of life in American small towns and the Midwest in many of his stories’ literary worlds. Drury achieved early recognition with his novel The End of Vandalism (1994), which was picked as an ALA Notable Book in 1995 and has been described as a “masterpiece” and a “slow march to greatness” by The Independent. His other novels include The Black Brook (1998), Hunts in Dreams (2000), The Driftless Area (2006), and Pacific (2013), which have been translated, among others, into Spanish, French, and German. Drury’s short stories have been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Ploughshares, and other venues. Additionally, he also recently cowrote a screenplay for the film adaptation of The Driftless Area (2015).

Drury has been praised as a “major figure in American literature” (The New York Times) and “an overlooked giant of American comic fiction” (The Guardian), and he has been mentioned alongside an “extraordinary generation of American novelists” including Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, and David Foster Wallace (The Independent). Among many other awards, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and he was featured on the National Book Awards Longlist. Drury holds a BA in Journalism and an MA in English and Creative Writing, and he has been a writer-in-residence and visiting writer at Hollins University and Wesleyan University. His most recent book, Pacific, will be published alongside The End of Vandalism and Hunts in Dreams as a ‘Midwest trilogy’ in German by Klett-Cotta in the fall of 2017.