SOURCE: "Shy Author Likes to Live and Work in Obscurity," in The New York Times, April 9, 1997, pp. C13, C18.

[In the following essay, Smith provides some biographical information about the author and a summary of his works.]

The writer Steven Millhauser was teaching his fiction workshop class at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on Monday afternoon when the chairman of his department entered the classroom and handed him a note asking him to call a reporter from a local newspaper "re: Pulitzer." "I told my students that a grotesque error had been committed," Mr. Millhauser said yesterday, "and that I had to straighten it out."

Of course, it was no error. Mr. Millhauser had received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, published last year. But his suspicions were understandable. Until today, few but readers of serious...