Andre Dubus III resisted the idea of being an author for many years because his father, Andre Dubus, who died in 1999, continues to be well recognized as one of America's best short-fiction writers, and the younger Dubus simply wanted to do something different. Additionally, noted detective-fiction writer James Lee Burke is Dubus III's cousin. The younger Dubus has held a variety of jobs--bounty hunter, private investigator, carpenter, bartender, actor, and teacher--but, as he told Oprah Winfrey in a 24 January 2001 television interview, "Growing up, I never wanted to be a writer. I found that when I did start writing, I felt more like myself than I've ever felt. I had to write to be me." The Dubus stock has had a significant impact upon the writing of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Dubus was born on 11 September 1959 in Oceanside, California, to Andre Dubus Jr. and his wife...