Steve Erickson - Biography

Biography

Steve Erickson was born and brought up as an only child in Los Angeles. For many years his mother, a former actress, ran a small theatre in L.A; his father (died in 1990) was a photographer. When he was a child he stuttered badly. Because of his stuttering some teachers believed that he could not read. This motif occasionally has recurred in his novels, such as Amnesiascope.

Erickson studied film at UCLA (BA, 1972), then journalism (M.A. 1973). For a few years he worked as a freelance writer for alternative weekly newspapers. His first novel, Days Between Stations, was published in 1985.

Since 1985 Erickson has published nine novels and two non-fiction books, Leap Year and American Nomad. Erickson himself appears briefly as a fictional character in Michael Ventura's 1996 novel, The Death of Frank Sinatra.

Erickson has written on a variety of topics in periodicals including The New York Times Magazine, Esquire and Rolling Stone among others. Currently he is a teacher with the MFA Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and is the editor of the national literary magazine Black Clock. He has written about film for Los Angeles magazine since 2001 and twice has been nominated for the National Magazine Award in criticism.

Erickson's work has been admired and cited by other authors including Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem and Mark Z. Danielewski. His novel Tours of the Black Clock appears on critic Larry McCaffery's list of the 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction; and in a winter 2008 poll by the National Book Critics Circle of 800 novelists and writers, Erickson's Zeroville was named one of the five favorite novels of the previous year. In March 2011, Variety announced that actor-director James Franco had acquired feature rights to Zeroville.

He lives with his family in Topanga Canyon, in Southern California.