More About the Author
After two more novels, Earthly Bread (1976) and Land Without Shadow (1979), Mewshaw turned to non-fiction with Life for Death (1980), an account of a murder case that involved a childhood friend who killed his parents at the age of 15. Mewshaw’s family was instrumental in getting the boy released after 12 years in prison. The book won an award from the Texas Institute of Letters.
Continuing with non-fiction, Mewshaw followed the men’s professional tennis tour in the early ‘80s and produced Short Circuit, a chronicle of the game’s seamy underside. The book became a bestseller but resulted in Mewshaw’s being banned from tournaments.
Basing himself in Rome after winning a Guggenheim, Mewshaw branched out into travel writing and frequently published humorous pieces about expat life. On assignment for the New York Times, he covered events in North Africa, South Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Many of these articles were later collected in Playing Away (1988).
In addition to his coverage of travel, true crime (Money to Burn, 1987) and tennis Ladies of the Court (1993), Mewshaw continued to produce novels. Year of the Gun (1984) focused on urban terrorism in Rome. Its depiction of the kidnapping and assassinations of Aldo Moro became the basis of a film directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Sharon Stone.
Sticking with fiction but switching gears, Mewshaw published Blackballed (1986), a comedy about men’s professional tennis. Then in 1990, his novel True Crime reconsidered the themes of family dysfunction and violence which he had previously dealt with in Life for Death and Money to Burn.
After a decade in Europe, Mewshaw returned to the US as Visiting Writer at the University of Virginia. When not teaching, he worked on a novel, Shelter from the Storm (2003), set in central Asia in an unnamed country loosely based on Afghanistan. At the same time, he started publishing autobiographical sketches about his encounters with celebrated authors, including William Styron, Paul Bowles, Anthony Burgess, and Graham Greene. (2003).
In the mid-‘90s, Mewshaw moved back to Europe, basing himself in London, but spending winters in Key West, Florida. That semi-tropical setting with its aging population served as the backdrop for his tenth novel, Island Tempest (2005). Except for Lying With the Dead (2007), a fictionalization of events from his childhood in Maryland, Mewshaw concentrated on non-fiction for the next 15 years. If You Could See Me Now (2006) reexamined the factual basis of his second novel, Waking Slow (1972). Then in 2008, to celebrate his 65th birthday, Mewshaw took an overland trip across North Africa from Alexandria, Egypt, through Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria to Tangiers, Morocco. Traveling alone without a cellphone or camera, trying to blend in with the local population, he chronicled the journey in Between Terror and Tourism (2010) which was selected by National Geographic as one of its best books of the year.
Then in a trio of literary memoirs, Sympathy for the Devil (2014), The Lost Prince (2019) and My Man in Antibes (2023), Mewshaw recalled his friendships with Gore Vidal, Pat Conroy and Graham Greene. Sympathy for the Devil was shortlisted for the Carr Collins Award and The Lost Prince was longlisted for the PEN prize for biography.
Now at the age of 82, he has brought out his twelfth novel, Not Heaven But Paradise.
Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio’s longtime “voice of Books,” called him “the best novelist in America that nobody knows.”
Michael Mewshaw is an American author of 12 novels and 12 books of nonfiction, and works frequently as a travel writer, investigative reporter, book reviwer, and tennis reporter. His novel Year of the Gun was made into a film of the same name by John Frankenheimer in 1991. He is married with two sons.
Born in Washington, DC, and raised in the suburb of Prince George's County, Maryland, Mewshaw graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Maryland, College Park, then was granted a four-year fellowship. While studying at UVA, Mewshaw completed two unpublished novels, then embarked on a road trip across Mexico with his wife (at the urging of William Styron, who was the subject of his masters thesis and doctoral dissertation); a journey which would form the basis of his first novel Man in Motion (1970), which he completed while on a Fulbright Fellowship in France.
Mewshaw taught creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and subsequently was named Director of Creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Taking leaves of absence every other year from this post, Mewshaw based himself in Rome, Italy, and continued traveling throughout Europe and North Africa. While Mewshaw researched his third novel The Toll (1974) in Marrakesh, Morocco, his wife Linda was hired as Lindsay Wagner's stand-in on the set of Robert Wise's film "Two People." Mewshaw's experience of that shoot was the jumping-off point for his fifth novel Land Without Shadow (1979).