Biography
McDevitt went to La Salle University, where a short story of his won the annual Freshman Short Story Contest and was published in the school's literary magazine, Four Quarters. As McDevitt explained in an interview, "I was on my way. Then I read David Copperfield and realized I could never write at that level, and therefore I should find something else to do. I joined the Navy, drove a cab, became an English teacher, took a customs inspector's job on the northern border, and didn't write another word for a quarter-century." McDevitt received a Master's degree in literature from Wesleyan University in 1971. He returned to writing when his wife, Maureen, encouraged him to try his hand at it in 1980. As of 2007, McDevitt lives near Brunswick, Georgia. In 2005, he donated his archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.
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