Frederic Tuten

Frederic Tuten is an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He has written five novels – The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), Tallien: A Brief Romance (1988), Tintin in the New World: A Romance (1993), Van Gogh's Bad Café (1997) and The Green Hour (2002) – as well as one book of inter-related short stories, Self-Portraits: Fictions (2010), and essays, many of the latter being about contemporary art. His memoir My Young Life (2019) was published by Simon & Schuster. In 2022, he published a collection of short stories, The Bar at Twilight, and On a Terrace in Tangier, a book of Tuten's drawings, each drawing accompanied by a short story. Tuten received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction and was given the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded four Pushcart Prizes and one O. Henry Prize. Born in The Bronx, New York City, Tuten is the son of a Sicilian mother and a French-Huguenot father and was raised in an impoverished but book-cultured family.

Tuten received his undergraduate degree from the City College of New York. After studying pre-Columbian art history at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and travelling through South America, writing on Brazilian cinema, he earned a Ph.D. in 19th-century American literature from New York University, concentrating on Melville, Whitman, and James Fenimore Cooper, and taught literature and American cinema in France at the University of Paris VIII: Vincennes—Saint-Denis.Tuten spent 15 years heading the graduate program in creative writing at the City College of New York, which he co-founded. In that capacity, he championed the work of students Walter Mosley, Oscar Hijuelos, Philip Graham, Aurelie Sheehan, Salar Abdoh, Ernesto Quiñonez, and many others. He taught classes on experimental writing at The New School. He was on the board of advisors for Guernica Magazine and executive editor of Smyles & Fish. Tuten's short fiction has appeared in Granta, Conjunctions, Fence, Fiction, The New Review of Literature, Tri-Quarterly, BOMB, and Harper's Magazine. In 1973, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing and in 2001 was given the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Tuten has worked as an art and film critic in various venues such as the New York Times and Artforum and often incorporates allusions to these fields in his fiction as well. Tuten was a close friend of the artist Roy Lichtenstein and published several essays on his work, as well as catalogue essays for many other artists including John Baldessari, Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, R. B. Kitaj, and David Salle.

Tuten currently resides in New York City's East Village.