Steven Millhauser, one of the most original novelists to emerge in the 1970s, was born on 3 August 1943 in New York and grew up in Connecticut where his father, Milton Millhauser, was an English professor at the University of Bridgeport. Millhauser received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965 and later did graduate work at Brown University for three years. The first of his two novels, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972), was cited as one of the year's most notable books by Newsweek and Time and won France's Prix Medicis Etranger. The two main concerns of Millhauser's fiction are literature and childhood. His novels contain parodies of specific writers and genres and are heavily allusive. But more important is Millhauser's unsentimental presentation of the pains and pleasures of childhood, a period he rescues from the cliches of popular culture and...