Gilbert Sorrentino was born in Brooklyn, New York, to August E. and Ann Davis Sorrentino. He married and was later divorced from Elsene Wiessner. He is now married to Victoria Ortiz, and he has three children: Jesse, Delia, and Christopher. He was educated in New York public schools and attended Brooklyn College (now part of the City University of New York) in 1950-1951 and from 1955 to 1957. He served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from 1951 to 1953. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction (1973), a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1974), a Samuel S. Fels Award for the short story "Catechism" (1974), and a Creative Artists Public Service grant (1975). Sorrentino lives in New York City, where he teaches at the New School for Social Research.

Sorrentino has been a word craftsman for over thirty years. He began writing poetry soon after high school. While working as a clerk...