John Thorndike

I grew up in Connecticut, read a thousand novels as a child and always wanted to write one. After four desperate years at a New England prep school I went to Harvard, wrote some fiction, studied night and day. Then a master’s degree from Columbia, two years in the Peace Corps and a year of doctoral studies at NYU, brought to an end by the delirious sixties, marriage and parenthood. In 1970 my wife and I moved to an isolated farm in Chile, where we lived for two years. When we divorced in 1974, I wound up with custody of our son, Janir.

I settled with him in Athens, Ohio, where for ten years I ran a truck farm. I built some houses, ran an alternative school and started writing, both freelance and fiction. My first two books were novels: Anna Delaney’s Child (Macmillan, 1986), about a woman whose nine-year-old son dies in a car crash, and The Potato Baron(Villard, 1989), about a married couple struggling to decide whose life they are going to live. I moved to Colorado for five years, and to New Mexico for eight, before coming back to Ohio. My third book was a memoir about raising my son in the face of his mother’s schizophrenia: Another Way Home (Crown, 1996, with a paperback by Penguin).

After building eight houses in eight years, I moved to Cape Cod to look after my father, whose Alzheimer’s was growing worse. He wanted to go on living in his house, and I wanted to let him. The Last of His Mind: A Year in The Shadow of Alzheimer’s (Swallow Press, 2009) is a memoir about the last year of his life. My most recent book is a novel set in Havana and Miami in the late Fifties, A Hundred Fires in Cuba.

EDUCATION

M.A.  Columbia University, 1966

B.A.  Harvard University, 1964

BOOK PUBLICATIONS

A Hundred Fires in Cuba – Paperback, 330 pages, Publisher: Beck & Branch (2018), ISBN 978-0-9972644-7-0. Ebook ISBN 978-0-9972644-8-7

The Last of His Mind – Hardcover: 243 pages, Publisher: Swallow Press (2009), ISBN 13 978-0-8040-1122-8. Paperback: 243 pages, Publisher: Swallow Press (2011), ISBN 13 978-0-8040-1136-5

Another Way Home -Hardcover: 245 pages, Publisher: Crown (1996), ISBN 0-517-70542-7. Paperback: 245 pages, Publisher: Penguin (1997), ISBN 0-14-026570-8

The Potato Baron -Hardcover: 284 pages, Publisher: Villard (1989), ISBN 0-394-57712-4

Anna Delaney’s Child -Hardcover: 273 pages, Publisher: Macmillan (1986), ISBN 0-02-618390-0. Paperback:273 pages, Publisher: Plume (1987), ISBN 0-452-25998-3

FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS, AWARDS

2009             Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center

2008              Fellowship, The MacDowell Colony

2007              Individual Excellence Award, Ohio Arts Council

2004              Fellowship, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

1991               Dakin Fellow, Sewanee Writers’ Conference

1990              Individual Artist Grant panelist, Ohio Arts Council

1987              Fellowship, Leighton Artist Colony, The Banff Centre

1986              Fellowship, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

1986              Fellowship, Ragdale Foundation

1982              Individual Artist Grant, Ohio Arts Council