Author Allan Gurganus on campus Oct. 1 for Steloff Lecture

Acclaimed author Allan Gurganus will present Skidmore's 38th annual Frances Steloff Lecture at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 1, in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall. Gurganus will read from a new work of fiction, talk with Mason Stokes and Robert Boyers of the college's English Department, and take audience questions. A book-signing will follow. Admission is free and open to the public.

Author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, White People, Plays Well With Others, and The Practical Heart, Gurganus has been called "a Mark Twain for our age, hilariously clear-eyed, blessed with perfect pitch" ( Le Monde). Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar, called him "the rightful heir to Faulkner and Welty." A 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Gurganus has been a visiting writer and a faculty member at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore, and will teach there again in July 2010.

Gurganus's first published story, "Minor Heroism," appeared in The New Yorker when he was 26. His first book, the 1989 novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, spent eight months on TheNew York Times best-seller list, and was made into an Emmy Award-winning television program. White People, a collection of stories and novellas, received TheLos Angeles Times Book Prize and was a Pen-Faulkner finalist. His latest book, The Practical Heart: Four Novellas, received the Lambda Literary Award. His new novel, The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church, will be the second in The Falls Trilogy that commenced with Widow.

Gurganus's short fiction appears in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, and other magazines, and has been included in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Stories, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and Best New Stories of the South. His political editorials often appear in The New York Times.

Born in 1947 in Rocky Mount, N.C., the son of a teacher and businessman, Gurganus attended the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he trained in art. His paintings and drawings are represented in private and public collections, and he has illustrated three limited editions of his fiction. During the Vietnam War, while serving in the United States Navy, he became interested in writing "after falling under the spell of Henry James's books, aboard the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, " according to Salon. He went on to Sarah Lawrence College, where he worked with Grace Paley, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where his mentors were Stanley Elkin and John Cheever. Gurganus has taught writing and literature at Stanford, Duke, Sarah Lawrence, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His former students include the novelists Ann Patchett, Elizabeth McCracken, and Donald Antrim, among others. He lives in a small North Carolina town, where he spends time gardening and writing.

"Writing is a clarifying experience," Gurganus said in an interview that appeared in the online literary magazine Identity Theory. "It's a second form of dreaming. It's a cultural intuition. It's a way of having the world make brief sense for yourself. ? It's not that I am writing a great masterpiece, it's like a bread maker, I just have to have my hands in the yeast."

A high point of the academic year, Skidmore's annual Steloff Lecture was established in 1967 by Frances Steloff, a native of Saratoga Springs who became a well-known patron of writers and founded the Gotham Book Mart in New York City. She endowed the series as a way to bring outstanding literary and artistic talent to the college. Previous Steloff speakers include Don DeLillo, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Saul Bellow, Mario Vargas Llosa, Katharine Anne Porter, Louise Gluck, Chinua Achebe, Susan Sontag, and Arthur Miller.