Dwight Allen, '74
The Green Suit. Hardcover, 274 pages; Algonquin Books of Chapel
Hill, 2000.
Dwight Allen is an alumnus not only of Lawrence but of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and ten years on the staff of the New Yorker. Now living and writing in Madison, Wisconsin, he has seen his short stories published in literary magazines such as the Georgia Review, Missouri Review, and Shenandoah and collected in such anthologies as New Stories from the South and American Short Fiction.
The Green Suit is a collection of related stories that, together, tell the tale of one Peter Sackrider, whose fictional biography bears at least a passing resemblance to that of Dwight Allen.
One reviewer wrote: "He's one of the most lucid writers I've ever read. You can glide through his text like a hot knife through soft butter, to dredge up a Wisconsin simile. A publisher's blurb compares his prose to John Updike and E. B. White. They have a point." The Green Suit was also reviewed in the Sunday New York Times book section.
Judge: A Novel. Hardcover, 320 pages; Algonquin Books, April 2003.
Allen, author of The Green Suit (2000) and a former New Yorker writer and graduate of the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, has published his second book, first novel.
Reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, it was described by Booklist as "moving and perceptive, elegaic yet often funny . . . a remarkable debut."
Read a Wisconsin Academy Review interview with Dwight Allen, September 2003
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