A great bear of a man with beard and laughing face, Frederick Busch has earned his reputation as one of the finest young novelists in America. He is also a short-story writer, literary critic, and teacher, but these pursuits are secondary to his primary concern with the novel. Writing about family love in a time of general domestic strife, controlling his experiments with form and voice in an era of gratuitous innovation, and urging the reader to feel in a time when emotion is suspect, Busch expands the limits of fiction and humanity.

He was born in the Midwood section of Brooklyn to Phyllis and Benjamin Busch. After attending local schools, he entered Muhlenberg College (Allentown, Pennsylvania) from which he received the A.B. degree in English in 1962. He then went to Columbia University as a Woodrow Wilson National Fellow to study for a master's degree in seventeenth-century...