Early Career
Grayson was born in Brooklyn, and attended New York public schools and the City University of New York, receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College, where he was also an undergraduate. His first stories started appearing in literary magazines in the mid-1970s, and in 1979, his first book-length collection of short stories, With Hitler in New York, was published. In the same year Grayson, active in liberal politics since his teenage years, registered with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as a candidate for Vice President of the United States, receiving coverage for his humorous "campaign" in The New York Times and various other media outlets.
He began a long career in higher education as an adjunct lecturer in English at Long Island University in 1975, and has taught English and other subjects at numerous colleges and high schools in New York, Florida, and Arizona. For a number of years Grayson divided his time between New York City and South Florida, where many of his stories are set.
By 1979, Grayson had over 125 stories published in magazines and anthologies. He remained a prolific writer in the early 1980s, when several short story collections came out in quick succession: Lincoln's Doctor's Dog (1982), Eating at Arby's (1982), and I Brake for Delmore Schwartz (1983). Grayson's stories from this period characterized by an extreme self-consciousness, an appreciation of wordplay and jokes, and confessions of ineptitude on the part of the author. Most of these stories originally appeared in journals such as Transatlantic Review, Texas Quarterly, California Quarterly, and Epoch.
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