Eric Larsen was born in 1941, in
Northfield,
Minnesota, where, after attending the public
schools, he graduated from
Carleton
College in 1963. He
completed his Ph.D. in English at the
University of
Iowa
in 1971.
That same year, after living abroad for two years, Larsen
joined the English Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY,
and remained there until his retirement in early 2006.
Larsen published stories and essays throughout the 1970s and
1980s. In 1988, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill brought out his novel An American Memory, which won the Chicago Tribune
