Andrew Holleran


Andrew Holleran is the pseudonym of Eric Garber, an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, born and partly raised in Aruba, in the Dutch Caribbean. He is a prominent novelist of post-Stonewall gay literature. He was a member of The Violet Quill, a gay writer's group that met briefly from 1980-81. The Violet Quill included other prolific gay writers like Edmund White and Felice Picano. Garber, who has historically been very protective of his privacy, uses "Andrew Holleran" as his pseudonym.

Early life

Holleran, born in Aruba in 1943 as Eric Garber, spent much of his childhood there before attending Harvard College, where he graduated in 1965.
During his senior year at Harvard, he met Peter Taylor, a novelist who taught creative writing. Holleran briefly followed him to the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop to avoid "the horror of law school," before going to law school at the University of Pennsylvania. Holleran was drafted in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, and after his first year of law school, went to West Germany. Following his return to the United States after the Army, he attended one additional semester of law school and then moved to New York City.

Career

Following his move to New York City, Holleran spent nearly ten years temping and bar tending before Dancer from the Dance, his first novel, was published in 1978. Its narrative takes place among the discotheques of New York City and Fire Island, although it is Fire Island, with its literal distance from the mainland, that provides a pivotal backdrop for the novel. Dancer shares many of its locales, as well as its themes, with Faggots, Larry Kramer's novel, published in the same year.
Holleran's second novel was Nights in Aruba, and his third is titled The Beauty of Men. The Beauty of Men takes place in central Florida where the main character, a 47-year-old gay man, has gone to take care of his quadriplegic mother. Holleran's ' received the 2007 Stonewall Book Award.
For a number of years Holleran taught creative writing at American University in Washington, DC, and he continues to publish short fiction in gay short story collections like ' and frequently publishes articles in The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.
In a review of his work in The New York Times, a critic wrote that Holleran's works "...seem so determined to speak for their disenfranchised gay characters that the works become inaccessible to anyone else, like looking through a window at someone else's world."

Awards

He received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 2007. He also received the 2007 Stonewall Book Award for Grief.

Works