Stanly Elkin was born in New York City on 11 May 1930 and was raised in Chicago. His father, a traveling salesman with a gift for storytelling, probably exerted the single most important influence on his son's literary career. Married to Joan Marion Jacobson on 1 February 1953, Stanley Elkin now lives with her and their three children in St. Louis, Missouri. From 1955-1957, he served in the United States Army where his fascination with radio and the idea of writing a novel about radio grew. During his student years at the University of Illinois, Urbana--where he received his Ph.D. in 1961 with a dissertation on Faulkner--he worked on Accent magazine, which published one of his earliest stories, "Among the Witnesses," in 1959. For this story and "In the Alley," published in the same year by the Chicago Review, the author received the Longview Foundation Award in 1962. His teaching career as a professor...