| American Author: Pete Dexter |
Pete Dexter's third book is still his best known – Paris Trout won the National Book Award and was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dexter was a journalist for 15 years in Florida and Philadelphia before turning to fiction. His first novel, published in 1984, was called God's Pocket. Dexter has also written some 20 screenplays.
Most Famous Works
| Works: Works by Pete Dexter |
| 1988 | Paris Trout. A hardware store owner and loan shark to the black community in Cotton Point, Georgia, goes to prison after he kills two people in an effort to collect an outstanding debt. He bribes his way out of prison and goes crazy, becoming, in reviewer Richard Eder's words, "primal evil, all will and no humanity." The novel wins the National Book Award. Dexter is known for his expert blend of violence and humor, evocative dialogue, and shrewd use of local color. |
| Wikipedia: Pete Dexter |
Pete Dexter (born 1943) is an American novelist. He was the recipient of the 1988 National Book Award for Fiction for his novel Paris Trout.
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Dexter was born in Pontiac, Michigan. After his father died, when Dexter was four, he and his mother moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, where she married a college physics professor.[1]
He was a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News,[1] the The Sacramento Bee,[2] and syndicated to many newspapers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Prior to that he worked for what is now The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Florida, but quit in 1972 because the paper's owners forced the editorial page editor to endorse Richard Nixon over George McGovern.[2]
He began writing fiction after a life-changing 1981 incident in which thirty drunken Philadelphians in the neighborhood of Grays Ferry, armed with baseball bats and upset by a recent column about a drug deal-gone-wrong murder, beat the writer severely. The brother of the homicide victim was a bartender at a Grays Ferry bar and Dexter and his friend Randall "Tex" Cobb went to the bar to talk to him because the family had called the newspaper to complain. In the fight that occurred outside the bar in the street, Cobb received a broken arm that helped end his professional boxing career, and Dexter was hospitalized with a several injuries, including a broken back, pelvic bone, brain damage, and dental devastation.[3]
Dexter lives and writes on Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound area of the state of Washington.[1][2][3]
Paper Trails, published in 2007, is a compilation of columns he wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News and The Sacramento Bee from the 1970s to the 1990s.
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| Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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