Steven Moore

The second volume, covering the period 1600–1800, was published by Bloomsbury in August 2013, and won the Christian Gauss Award for literary criticism for that year.

Steven Moore (born May 15, 1951) is an American author and literary critic.

Best known as the primary authority on the novelist William Gaddis, he is the author of the two-volume study The Novel: An Alternative History.

Born outside of Los Angeles Steven Moore moved to Littleton, Colorado, in 1963, where he attended Arapahoe High School (1966–69), and played bass guitar in Earthquake Moving Company, one of many rock bands he was in, often playing his own compositions.

At the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, his first literary writings were poems contributed to college literary magazines.

In his junior year, he switched majors from history to English, earning both a B.A. (1973) and an M.A. (1974).

From 1974 until 1977 he worked as a substitute teacher while writing a novel (Clarinets and Candles, unpublished) and the beginnings of a second.

From 1974 to 1978 he was a member of the Colorado Concert Ballet, dancing a variety of minor roles.

Moore is the leading authority on the novels of William Gaddis, which he discovered in 1975 and about whom he has written several books and essays.

He began working at ABC Books in Denver in 1976.

Two years later he opened his own independent bookstore, Moore Books, which he operated until selling it in 1981.

During this time, he published his first works of literary criticism: a series of short notes on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in A Wake Newslitter, and book reviews for a Denver arts magazine called Spree.

He also wrote his first book, A Readers Guide to William Gaddis's "The Recognitions", published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1982.

This was followed by In Recognition of William Gaddis, a collection of essays by various hands, for which he wrote the introduction and contributed an essay.

In 1983, Moore returned to college to earn a Ph.D., first at University of Denver, then at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he graduated in 1988.

His dissertation was published the following year as William Gaddis by Twayne Publishers.

During these years he continued to write essays for scholarly journals and book reviews for a variety of publications.

(See list of publications, below.)

Co-edited with John Kuehl, it was published by Syracuse University Press in 1984.

A brief interest in vampire literature led to an anthology Moore edited titled Vampire in Verse, which was published in 1985.

In 1988 Moore joined the staff of Dalkey Archive Press, a press in Illinois that also published The Review of Contemporary Fiction, to which he had contributed in the past.

Moore was managing editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction during this same period (1988–1996), to which he contributed many essays and book reviews.

Beginning in 1990, Moore started reviewing new fiction for newspapers, principally for the Washington Post, but also for The Nation, Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, along with reviews in scholarly journals.

In 1996, Dalkey published Moore's Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials.

Moore was let go from Dalkey Archive Press in 1996 and continued in the book trade with Borders Books and Music later that year.

He was the guest speaker at two Gaddis symposia (Orléans, France, 2000, and Buffalo, NY, 2005), and assisted with the Chinese translation of Gaddis's J R published in 2008.

After working at its first Colorado store for four years, he was promoted to book buyer for the entire chain and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2001.

That same year, his edition of Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli was published by (Black Sparrow Press).

In addition to his buying duties, Moore was the editor of the Borders Classics line (2003-5).

In early 2004, Moore began writing a two-volume survey entitled The Novel: An Alternative History, with special attention to innovative works; the first volume appeared in April 2010 from Continuum Books.

Reviewing it in the Washington Post, Alberto Manguel wrote, "Moore tells his story with erudition and wit, and in doing so restores to the reader of good fiction confidence in the craft."

In the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks disliked its "gung ho tone" but concluded, "Moore's book has the great merit of listing and summarizing scores upon scores of stories" and that "reading these summaries is a pleasure."

He was laid off in January 2010, though he continues to reside in Ann Arbor.

Since then, he has supported himself as a freelance indexer for university presses.

His edition of The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.

Moore has long championed lengthy, innovative novels: as he told an interviewer, "generally I like 'em big and brainy."

Novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote that Moore is a "scholar whose criticism is a model of clarity and intelligent advocacy."