Andrew Sean Greer's Biography

Andrew Sean Greer was born in Washington, D.C., the son of two scientists. He studied writing at Brown University, where he was the commencement speaker at his own graduation. After years in New York working as a chauffeur, television extra and unsuccessful writer, he moved to Missoula, Montana, where he received a master of fine arts degree from the University of Montana. He soon moved to San Francisco and began to publish in magazines such as Esquire, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker before releasing a collection of his stories, How It Was for Me.

His first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, was published to much acclaim in 2001, and his second book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, came out in 2004. John Updike first put this novel on the literary map when, in the pages of The New Yorker, he called it “enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov.” Mitch Albom then chose Max for the Today Show Book Club, and it soon became a bestseller. Andrew is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

He lives in San Francisco.