Andre Dubus
III, before finding his calling as a writer, worked for brief stints as a bounty hunter, private investigator, carpenter,
bartender, actor, and teacher. His first book, The Cage Keeper and Other
Stories, was published in 1989, followed in 1993 by his first novel, Bluesman.
For the next few years, he taught and did odd jobs as a carpenter while working
on House of Sand and Fog. Much of the book was written in his car, which
he often parked at a local cemetery in search of quiet and solitude. His
characters were inspired by two people whose predicaments had stuck in his mind
for years: a woman he read about in the newspaper who was wrongly evicted from
her house and forced to live in her car, and a college friend's father, who had
been a colonel in the Iranian air force and could only find menial jobs after
fleeing to the United States.
Dubus's work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and
the 1985 National Magazine Award for Fiction. It has also been cited in The
One Hundred Most Distinguished Stories of 1993 and The Best American
Short Stories of 1994. He was one of three finalists for the 1994 Prix de
Rome given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and House of Sand and
Fog was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction.
Andre Dubus III is the son of Andre Dubus, a widely
recognized master of short fiction who died in 1999. He teaches in Emerson
College's MFA in writing program, and at Tufts University. He lives in
Newburyport, Massachusetts, with his wife, dancer/choreographer Fontaine Dollas,
and their three children.
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