People like Steve Erickson

Stephen Michael Erickson is an American novelist. The author of influential works such as Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock and Zeroville, he is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Steve Erickson was born and raised in Los Angeles. For many years his mother, a former actress, ran a small theatre in L.A. His father, who died in 1990, was a photographer. Erickson had a pronounced stutter as a child, when teachers believed he couldn't read. This motif occasionally has recurred in novels such as Amnesiascope.

Erickson studied literature, film, journalism and political philosophy at UCLA. For a few years he worked as a freelance writer for alternative weekly newspapers. His first novel, Days Between Stations, was published in 1985. Along with three non-fiction books, Leap Year, American Nomad and American Stutter, Erickson has published ten novels in more than a dozen languages. Erickson appears briefly as a fictional character in Michael Ventura's 1996 novel The Death of Frank Sinatra.