Pete Dexter

Dexter worked for years as a newspaper columnist in Philadelphia and Sacramento before a group of men, enraged by one of his columns, beat him nearly to death in 1981, an assault that left him with permanent physical damage and fed directly into his fiction's preoccupation with sudden, senseless violence.

Paris Trout (1988), his second novel, follows a respected Georgia store owner whose murder of a young Black woman exposes the moral rot beneath a small town's genteel surface, told in the plain, unflinching prose of his journalism; it won the National Book Award in 1988.

He continued writing novels, including Deadwood and Paris Trout's spiritual successors, while also working as a screenwriter, dividing his fiction's attention between American violence and the men who look away from it.