Matthew Theron Ruff was born on September 8,1965 and is an American author of thriller, science-fiction and comic novels, including The Mirage and Lovecraft Country, the latter having been adapted in 2020 by HBO into a TV series.
13 Facts About Matt Ruff
2.
Matt Ruff's father was a hospital chaplain, and his maternal grandfather was a missionary.
3.
Matt Ruff spent his childhood and adolescence learning how to tell stories.
4.
Matt Ruff has said that reading these aloud in English class was his first experience performing in front of an audience and his first solid evidence that he had what it took to entertain people with his storytelling.
5.
Many adults around him attempted to persuade him to choose a different career, but Matt Ruff's mother was supportive of his hope to become a writer; for one of Matt Ruff's birthdays, she bought him an IBM Selectric typewriter.
6.
From third to eighth grade, Matt Ruff attended a parochial school.
7.
Matt Ruff wrote it in the 1970s, but never published it.
8.
Matt Ruff's father died after Ruff's first novel was published.
9.
Between 1982 and 1984, Matt Ruff wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about a Lutheran Minister's son who questions his faith.
10.
In 1985, Matt Ruff wrote a coming-of-age story set in Queens called "Today's Tom Sawyer", over the summer between his sophomore and junior years at Cornell.
11.
Matt Ruff based a character in the story on a female student in his class, and gave her a copy of the finished manuscript.
12.
Matt Ruff's first novel, Fool on the Hill, is a fantasy that drew on his experiences living in Risley Residential College at Cornell.
13.
Matt Ruff is the recipient of a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose.