Bio

Richard B. Schwartz was born in Cincinnati. He chronicled his adolescence there in his book, The Biggest City in America: A Fifties Boyhood in Ohio. His father was an attorney and, during the war, a Special Agent in the FBI. He attended the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois, where he did his graduate work in English and the History of Science. He served 2 years of active military duty at Fort Knox and as a Captain (Armor) teaching literature and philosophy at the United States Military Academy. He then taught for 12 years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he served as associate dean for the humanities in the graduate school, for 17 years at Georgetown University, where he served as dean of the graduate school and, twice, as interim executive vice president for the Main Campus, and, since 1998 at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he also served (1998-2006) as the dean of the college of arts and science.

He began his writing career studying the intellectual and social history of eighteenth-century England and did a tetralogy on Samuel Johnson, including the extremely popular Daily Life in Johnson’s London, which has sold over 10,000 copies and was translated into Japanese. More recently he has written on the culture wars and contemporary genre fiction, most prominently in his book, Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction.

He now devotes the bulk of his time to writing fiction and teaching creative writing in the program at Missouri. His wife, Dr. Judith A. Schwartz, is a writer, lecturer and university administrator. Most recently, she has served as Executive Director of the Lifelong Learning Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. Their son Jonathan is Senior Associate Vice President for University Advancement and Director of University Campaigns at the University of Rochester.