Steven Moore (author) - Biography/Career

Biography/Career

Born outside of Los Angeles, Steven Moore moved to Littleton, Colorado, in 1963, where he attended Arapahoe High School (1966-69). During this time he played bass guitar in Earthquake Moving Company, the first of many rock bands he would participate in until 1975, often featuring his own compositions.

His first literary writings were poems contributed to college literary magazines. In his junior year, he switched majors from history to English, earning both a B.A. (1973) and an M.A. (1974) from the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. From 1974 until 1977 he worked as a substitute teacher while writing a novel (Clarinets and Candles, unpublished) and the beginnings of a second. From 1974 to 1978 he was also a member of the Colorado Concert Ballet, dancing a variety of minor roles.

Unable to find a full-time teaching position, he began working at ABC Books in Denver in 1976. Two years later he opened his own independent bookstore, Moore Books, which he operated until selling it in 1981. During this time, he published his first works of literary criticism: a series of short notes on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in "A Wake Newslitter, and book reviews for a Denver arts magazine called Spree. He also wrote his first book, A Readers Guide to William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions,” published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1982. This was followed by In Recognition of William Gaddis, a collection of essays by various hands, for which he wrote the introduction and contributed an essay. Co-edited with John Kuehl, it was published by Syracuse University Press in 1984. A brief interest in vampire literature led to an anthology Moore edited titled Vampire in Verse, which was published in 1985.

In 1983, Moore returned to college to earn a Ph.D., first at Denver University, then at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he graduated in 1988. His dissertation was published the following year as William Gaddis by Twayne Publishers. During these years he continued to write essays for scholarly journals and book reviews for a variety of publications. (See list of publications, below.)

Again unable to find a teaching position, in 1988 Moore joined the staff of Dalkey Archive Press, a small press in Illinois that also published The Review of Contemporary Fiction, to which he had contributed in the past. Moore brought two books to Dalkey that elevated it from a little-known publisher to one of the premier literary presses in America: David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988) and Felipe Alfau’s Locos, which had been published in 1936 but long neglected. Alfau then gave Moore a manuscript written in the 1940s but never published entitled Chromos, which Dalkey published in 1990 to great acclaim. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, and along with Locos was translated into several foreign languages. Moore acquired and edited a number of other writers at Dalkey — Alan Ansen, Rikki Ducornet, Carole Maso, Janice Galloway, Alexander Theroux, Susan Daitch, Aurelie Sheehan — and reprinted works by a number of his favorite writers, including Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank, Robert Coover, Paul West, W. M. Spackman, John Barth, William H. Gass, Joseph McElroy, Marguerite Young, and Severo Sarduy. In 1996, Dalkey published Moore’s Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials.

Moore was managing editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction during this same period (1988-1996), to which he contributed many essays and book reviews. An early champion of David Foster Wallace, he solicited Wallace’s first published essay for RCF and suggested he apply for a teaching position at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, where Dalkey Archive was located. At Wallace's request, he also read an early draft of Infinite Jest and gave some editorial advice. Beginning in 1990, Moore also started reviewing new fiction for the Washington Post, for which he wrote during the next twenty years. During that same period, Moore also reviewed new books for The Nation, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and other periodicals.

Due to irreconcilable differences with the publisher, Moore resigned from Dalkey in 1996, and continued in the book trade by joining Borders Books and Music later that year. After working at its first Colorado store for four years, he was promoted to book buyer for the entire chain and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2001, where he still resides, although he was laid off by Borders in January 2010. In 2001, the year he moved to Ann Arbor, Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli (Black Sparrow Press) was published. Since 2004, Moore has been writing a multi-volume history of the novel, The Novel: An Alternative History, with special attention to innovative works; the first volume appeared in April 2010 from Continuum Books. Reviewing it in the Washington Post, Alberto Manguel wrote, "Moore tells his story with erudition and wit, and in doing so restores to the reader of good fiction confidence in the craft." In the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks disliked its "gung ho tone" but concluded, "Moore's book has the great merit of listing and summarizing scores upon scores of stories" and that "reading these summaries is a pleasure."

Moore is the world's leading authority on the novels of William Gaddis, whose value he discovered early and about whom he has written several books and essays. He was the guest speaker at two Gaddis symposia (Orleans, France, 2000, and Buffalo, NY, 2005), and assisted with the Chinese translation of Gaddis's J R published in 2008. His edition of The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.

Moore has long championed lengthy, innovative novels: as he told an interviewer, "generally I like 'em big and brainy." Novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote that Moore is a "scholar whose criticism is a model of clarity and intelligent advocacy."