Richard Russo

Russo was born and raised in Gloversville, New York, a declining leather-mill town that became the direct model for the fictional Mohawk Valley communities running through most of his fiction; he studied at the University of Arizona before teaching literature and creative writing for two decades.

Empire Falls (2001) follows Miles Roby, manager of a diner in a fading Maine mill town controlled by one wealthy family, its large cast of failed marriages, generational grudges, and quiet desperation building steadily toward a shocking act of violence; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2002 and was adapted into an HBO miniseries.

He has continued writing novels of small-town decline and comic resilience (Nobody's Fool, its sequel Everybody's Fool, and the memoir Elsewhere), establishing himself as the leading chronicler of blue-collar, post-industrial small-town America.