Scott Spencer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Scott Spencer (born September 1, 1945 in Washington, DC ) is an American writer.

life and work

The son of a steel worker, Spencer grew up in southern Chicago. After high school, he briefly attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Roosevelt University until he graduated from the University of Wisconsin . During his student days he was politically active in the Congress of Racial Equality and the Young People's Socialist League, the youth organization of the US Socialist Party . Today he lives in a small town in upstate New York .

In addition to working as a journalist - he writes for The New York Times , The New Yorker and Rolling Stone , among others - Scott Spencer has written twelve novels, two of which were nominated for the National Book Award . Endless Love (1979) became a bestseller, with over two million copies sold . In 2004 Spencer was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship .

Endless Love has been filmed twice, first in 1981 by Franco Zeffirelli with Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt . Tom Cruise plays his first role as a "wild-looking arsonist ... in mercilessly short cut-off jeans" ( Roger Ebert ). In the remake of 2014 led Shana Feste Directed. The thriller Waking the Dead (2000) , directed by Keith Gordon and starring Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly, is based on the 1986 novel Spencers of the same name.

For the thrillers Breed (2012) and Brood (2014) that build on each other and are interspersed with horror elements , Spencer has adopted the pseudonym Chase Novak . Like John Banville with his alias Benjamin Black, he wanted, writes the New York Times , to express a move towards a more sensational, diabolical style.

Regarding his literary interests, Spencer says: “I am interested in how close our ordered life is to chaos, just as we experience that brutality can break out in societies where order was a year ago ... This expression of inner bestiality works captivating for me because I can identify with it ... I think we all wonder if we would be capable of such a thing, this kind of violence and under what circumstances, and what the consequences would be. "

Works

  • Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball (1975)
  • Preservation Hall (1976)
  • Endless Love (1979)
  • Waking the Dead (1986)
  • Secret Anniversaries (1990)
  • Men In Black (1995)
  • Rich Man's Table (1998)
  • A Ship Made of Paper (2003)
  • Willing (2008)
  • Man in the Woods (2010)
    • The Stranger in the Forest , translated by Cornelia Holfelder-von der Tann, Munich: btb 2014, ISBN 978-3-442-75426-7
  • River Under the Road (2017)

As Chase Novak

  • Breed (2012)
  • Brood (2014)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Endless Love" , rogerebert.com of February 14, 2014, accessed on January 4, 2015
  2. ↑ "Chase Novak Lampoon Manhattan Parenting in First Horror Novel" , booksnreview.com of 13 September 2012 Retrieved on December 16, 2015
  3. ↑ Janet Maslin , “The Twins Are Fine. The Parents Are Not ". In: The New York Times. August 29, 2012, accessed December 30, 2015 .
  4. ↑ "Scott Spencer: Turning Orderly Lives Into Chaos" , npr.org of 11 July 2011 Retrieved on December 16, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Spencer, Scott
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Novak, Chase (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 1, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Washington, DC