Thomas M(ichael) Disch Biography

Under the pseudonym Leonie Hargrave, Disch had his best sales for a book that was written in the style of a nineteenth-century Gothic novel, Clara Reeve (1975). With his partner, Charles Naylor, Disch wrote a well-reviewed historical novel focusing on Victorian England, Neighboring Lives (1981). The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984), a brilliant Gothic tale set in St. Paul (where Disch spent much of his youth) focusing on, among other things, the poet John Berryman, who leaped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, initiated a trilogy of literate contemporary Gothic novels rounded out by The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994) and The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft (1999). He achieved renown, as well, as a children's author with The Brave Little Toaster: A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances (1986), which was turned into a popular Disney animated feature. Yet, Disch has also lived a seemingly parallel existence as a poet, whose emergence in the United States did not become fully apparent to most American readers until the belated publication by Johns Hopkins University Press, in 1989, of Yes, Let's: New and Selected Poems, a collection that includes much of Disch's verse that had been in print in England for a decade.