Rick Moody

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Rick Moody (born Hiram Frederick Moody, III on October 18, 1961, New York City), is an American novelist and short story writer best known for The Ice Storm (1994), a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973.

His first novel Garden State (1992) won the Pushcart Editor's Choice Award. His memoir The Black Veil (2002) won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. He has also received the Addison Metcalf Award, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, the Paris Review, Harper's, Details, the New York Times, and Grand Street.

He grew up in several of the Connecticut suburbs where he later set stories and novels, including Darien and New Canaan. He graduated from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, Brown University, received a master's degree in fine art from Columbia University and has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase and Bennington College.

According to The Writer's Almanac, Moody dropped out of graduate school at Columbia after a year because he spent most of his time drinking and had a hard time paying his rent or holding a job. Moody stated, "I was a clerk at [a bookstore] and I got fired after one month. They said, 'We really like you and we respect you as a writer, but this cash register thing is just not working out.'"

Moody finally checked himself into a mental hospital, got sober, and then he wrote his first novel, Garden State, about young people growing up in the industrial wasteland of New Jersey.

He lives in Brooklyn and Fishers Island.

[edit] Works

Garden State (Novel, 1992)
The Ice Storm (Novel, 1994)
The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven (Novella and Stories, 1995)
Purple America (Novel, 1996)
Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited (Essays, 1997), co-edited with Darcey Steinke
Demonology (Stories, 2001)
The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions (2002)
The Diviners (Novel, 2005)

[edit] Trivia

Little, Brown and Company, the publisher of "The Diviners," changed the cover after the galleys came out because women reacted negatively to it. The original cover showed a Conan the Barbarian-type image in technicolor orange; the new cover uses that same image, but frames it as a scene on a movie screen. Sales were still slow.

In his now legendary review of The Black Veil in The New Republic, Dale Peck opened with the line, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation."

In 2006, Arizona state senator Thayer Verschoor cited complaints he had received about The Ice Storm as part of the reason he supported a measure allowing students to refuse assignments they find "personally offensive". Thayer said that "There’s no defense of this book. I can’t believe that anyone would come up here and try to defend that kind of material.", although eventually numerous professors did just that.[1]