Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellows in Fiction

Tom Drury

Class of Spring 2015

Writer

Berlin and New York

Untitled Novel

At the Academy, Drury drew upon the Faust legend to explore ambition, manipulation, and moral tradeoffs in a more or less contemporary setting. Just as he set out to write his first tragedy, “The Driftless Area,” in this as yet untitled novel he will attempt to write about a truly bad (as opposed to merely reckless or selfish) character. To do so, Drury has been reading various versions of the Faust story to understand, for example, the differences between Marlowe’s rather straightforward version and Goethe’s ambiguous approach to the character of Mephistopheles. As Drury writes, “I want to explore what these variants—and my own, which will be free to refer to the legend or not, as required by the narrative—can teach me about the motivation of the bad character and the way the community responds to its destructive force. It’s something I’ve never really done and I am looking forward to the challenge.”

Tom Drury is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York, and Berlin. Born in a small Iowa farm town, in 1956, he received a BA from the University of Iowa (1980) and an MA from Brown University in English/Creative Writing (1987). In 1990 he began publishing fiction in the New Yorker, working with the renowned editor Veronica Geng. Drury’s novels include The End of Vandalism (Grove, 1994), The Black Brook (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), Hunts in Dreams (Grove, 2001), The Driftless Area (Grove, 2006), and Pacific (Grove, 2013). He was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 1996 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000-2001. The End of Vandalism was cited as one of the best American novels of the past 45 years by GQ magazine (2002), and Pacific was long-listed for the National Book Award in 2013. Drury’s novels have been translated into German, Spanish, and French. His short fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Granta, New York Times Magazine, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and Mississippi Review. A short-film adaptation of his story “Path Lights” (2005), premiered on David Lynch Foundation TV in 2009 and was an official selection of the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, among many others. A feature film adaptation of The Driftless Area is forthcoming. Drury co-wrote both films with the director Zachary Sluser. In the 1990s Drury taught creative writing at Wesleyan University, and until the mid-2000s he worked off and on as a journalist for such newspapers as the Providence Journal, St. Petersburg Times, and the Litchfield County Times.