Steven Millhauser

Millhauser was born in New York City and raised in Connecticut, the son of an English professor; he studied at Columbia and Brown, and after years of quiet, only intermittently published fiction, has spent most of his career teaching creative writing at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs.

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996) follows a tobacconist's son who rises from bellboy to builder of ever more fantastical hotels, his American ambition escalating past all reasonable limit into something closer to hallucination; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1997.

His other books (Edwin Mullhouse, Enchanted Night, the story collections Dangerous Laughter and We Others) pursue the same obsessive, miniaturist fascination with games, automatons, and elaborately constructed worlds, earning him a reputation as one of American fiction's most meticulous fabulists.