![[]](gruber.jpg)
[Up: Favorite authors] [Robot Wisdom home page]
pix: [2003 several]
publisher's site: [multipage]
1940: born in NYC (middle class)
grows up with cousin RKT (mothers are sisters)
1949: writes comic books
writes book for senior musical
studies English at Columbia, alienated by Modernism
1963? finishes BS, studies marine biology at U of Miami (PhD on octopus behavior)
no-date: Army medic, chef; writes Classic Comics
1969-1970: writes for U of M's "Sea Frontiers" [toc1] [toc2]
1972: bitten by octopus off Bimini, meets 'Jane Doe' (Tropic of Night)
criminal justice analyst for Miami county manager
1976: environmental speechwriter in DC
1977? marries
working in the Carter White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy
policy analyst and speechwriter for the Environmental Protection Agency
1984: agrees to ghostwrite legal thriller for cousin Robert K Tanenbaum
1987? Russell, Milton, and Michael Gruber "Risk Assessment in Environmental Policy-Making" Science 236:286-290 [cite]
1993? joins The WELL online community [info]
1996: begins 1st non-RKT title (Witch's Boy)
2003: stops speaking to RKT? [cite]
Religion: Catholic convert [cite]
three grown kids
lives in Seattle in an old fishing bungalow overlooking Lake Washington and Mercer Island, with his wife who is an artist
fave writers: Naipaul, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Byatt, Pat Barker, Robertson Davies, Richard Powers, George Higgins, Elmore Leonard, Nicolas Freeling, Lawrence Block, Iain Banks, Connie Willis
ghostwritten as Robert K. Tanenbaum
"At first it was a lark. I considered myself a public servant; I had a kid in college. But I got into it and started developing the characters, and the characters started coming alive. The Tanenbaum books were domestic comedies wrapped up in a legal-thriller box. They were funny and witty and sad in a way that real novels are, but Tanenbaum was under the impression that people read them because they were interested in the legal issues." [source]
Gruber "created the characters and the novels based on stories Tanenbaum told him, or transcripts of cases Tanenbaum had worked on" [cite]
opens on 10Sep 1976
"Tropic of Night is based on an experience a friend of mine had. She was a beautiful woman, a white woman, who hooked up with a black nationalist poet [Amiri Baraka?]. She found herself traveling across the Sahara with this man toward Nigeria. The farther he went, the crazier he became. He started to berate her for everything that had happened in Africa.
She later worked as a medical anthropologist at Jackson Memorial Hospital (in Miami). People would be dying, but there was no physical underpinning for their diseases. These people had been cursed — by voodoo witches, by Santeria. She would go into the community and say, let's do an intervention, maybe get a curandero in." [source] [more]
cover: [knife]
"about a young street kid who becomes a modern Joan of Arc in a nasty corner of the world"
Artist profiles:
Robert Stone Damascus Gate |
Gustave Flaubert |
Peter Dickinson |
Lindsey Davis |
Iris Murdoch |
John le Carre |
Tom Wolfe |
Harold Brodkey |
Blanche McCrary Boyd |
William Wharton |
Joseph McElroy |
Ward Just |
Philip Pullman |
G Spencer Brown
music:
Joni Mitchell |
Marta Sebestyen |
Mary Coughlan |
Jane Siberry |
Hal Willner |
Michael Hurley |
Incredible String Band |
Van Dyke Parks
film:
Richard Lester |
Mike Leigh |
Jacques Rivette
misc:
J Krishnamurti |
Stephen Gaskin |
Frances Yates |
Hero Joy Nightingale
One-layer portals: James Joyce | Thomas Pynchon
Autobiographical:
general |
musical |
internet
Odds and ends:
jazz |
rock |
Nabokov |
Jesus |
Wilde |
Picasso |
Gibbon |
1899
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