Plagued by Fire

Paul Hendrickson is the author of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Hemingway’s Boat, and Sons of Mississippi, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award. Since 1998 he has been on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. For two decades before that, he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. Among his other books are Looking for the Light (1992 finalist for the NBCC award) and The Living and the Dead (1996 finalist for the National Book Award). He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. He is the father of two grown sons, both of whom work in media, and he lives with his wife, Cecilia, a retired nurse, in Washington, D.C., and outside Philadelphia.