Mona Simpson

Class of Fall 2024

Writer; Publisher

The Paris Review

The Great Man, So-Called

At the Academy, Simpson is working on a novel centered on two women in the life of the iconic American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt: his wife, Eleanor, from whom he was deeply estranged, and Francis Perkins, his secretary of labor, and the first woman to ever hold that post. The only American president to serve more than two terms, and a man whose disability was carefully kept from the American public, Roosevelt relied on these women as he devoted his energies during his first two terms on lifting the American economy out of a debilitating depression and during his third and fourth to the growing involvement with the war. Simpson became fascinated with these two women while studying letters written by domestic workers (who were not covered by the New Deal’s protections) for her novel “My Hollywood,” about Los Angeles nannies.

Mona Simpson is a writer based in Santa Monica, California. She holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA from Columbia University. Simpson is the author of seven novels: Anywhere but Here (Knopf, 1986), The Lost Father (Knopf, 1993), A Regular Guy (Knopf, 1997), Off Keck Road (Knopf, 2000), My Hollywood (Knopf, 2010), and Casebook (Knopf, 2014). Her latest novel is Commitment (Knopf, 2023), about a single mother’s collapse and the fate of her family as she enters a California state mental health hospital in the 1970s. Simpson’s short stories have appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic and the Iowa Review, and she is the recipient of a Whiting Prize, Lila Wallace Readers Digest Prize, Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was also a finalist for a Pen Falkner award and has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She has served as editor, publisher, and a member of the board of directors and editorial committee at the Paris Review and held the Sadie Samuelson Levy Chair at Bard College. She is on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles.