A short life of the author
Richard Russo (b. 1949) was born on 15 July 1949 in Johnstown, New York, a small city in the Mohawk Valley. He grew up in Gloversville, a former leather-manufacturing town in decline — the model for many of his fictional settings. He studied at the University of Arizona under the mentorship of Robert Houston and earned a PhD.
Life and Career
Mohawk (1986) — about life in a declining upstate New York town — was his debut. The Risk Pool (1988) continued his exploration of working-class Northeastern life.
Nobody’s Fool (1993) — about Sully Sullivan, a sixty-year-old construction worker and ne’er-do-well in the fictional town of North Bath, New York — was his first commercial success. Robert Benton adapted it as a film (1994) starring Paul Newman in one of his finest late performances.
Straight Man (1997) — about a creative writing professor during a week of chaos at a fictional Pennsylvania university — is one of the funniest academic satires in American fiction.
Empire Falls (2001) — about Miles Roby, who runs the Empire Grill in a dying Maine mill town, and the web of family, class, and history that keeps him there — won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. HBO adapted it as a miniseries (2005) starring Ed Harris and Paul Newman. Bridge of Sighs (2007) was his most ambitious novel. Everybody’s Fool (2016) returned to Sully Sullivan.
Major Works and Themes
Russo writes about people who stay — in dying towns, in difficult marriages, in jobs that diminish them — and finds in their persistence a kind of heroism. His fiction is comic, generous, and deeply empathetic.
Key Works
- Nobody’s Fool (1993)
- Straight Man (1997)
- Empire Falls (2001)
- Bridge of Sighs (2007)
Collecting Russo
Mohawk (1986, Vintage Contemporaries) — a paperback original — brings $30–$100.
Empire Falls (2001, Knopf) — the Pulitzer winner — brings $30–$80. Russo signs at events.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mohawk Russo's debut novel introduces the declining upstate New York mill town that would become his signature territory — following several interconnected families through a summer of personal and economic crisis in a community where the tannery has closed, the young have fled, and those who remain are sustained only by stubbornness, black humor, and the residual warmth of proximity. | 1986 | Vintage Contemporaries | English |
| Nobody's Fool Russo's comic masterpiece follows Sully — a sixty-year-old man in a declining upstate New York town who has failed at everything (marriage, fatherhood, work, responsibility) yet remains irresistibly alive — in a novel about American small-town decline that is simultaneously hilarious, heartbreaking, and populated with characters so vivid they seem to have existed before the book that contains them. | 1993 | Random House | English |
| The Risk Pool Russo's second novel follows a boy growing up between two parents in a declining upstate New York town — his anxious, aspirational mother and his absent, charming, irresponsible father — a novel about how children navigate between incompatible adults and how small towns offer both suffocation and belonging, establishing the territory Russo would perfect in Nobody's Fool. | 1988 | Random House | English |