John Crowley (; December 1, 1942 – August 8, 2026) was an American author of fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, and non-fiction. He studied at Indiana University and had a second career as a documentary film writer.
Crowley was best known as the author of Little, Big (1981), a work which received the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was called "a neglected masterpiece" by Harold Bloom, and his Ægypt series of novels, which revolve around the same themes of Hermeticism, memory, families and religion. His novel Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (2017) won the Mythopoeic Award in 2018 and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, while critics compared it in scope and ambition to Crowley's earlier works Little, Big and the Aegypt cycle.
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Early life and education
John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, on December 1, 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He studied at Indiana University. He moved to New York City after college to pursue filmmaking, and found work in documentary films, an occupation he pursued until his death.
Career
His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award in a one-year category Science Fiction;
it appears in David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. In 1981 came Little, Big, covered in Pringle's sequel, Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels.
In 1987 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
Crowley was also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. James Merrill, the organization's founder, greatly loved Little, Big, and was blurbed praising Crowley on the first edition of Love & Sleep. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaiano (Italy); Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet; and Four Freedoms, about workers at an Oklahoma defense plant during World War II. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, has been completed.
His short fiction is collected in three volumes: Novelty (containing the World Fantasy Award-winning novella Great Work of Time), Antiquities, and Novelties & Souvenirs, an omnibus volume containing nearly all his short fiction through its publication in 2004. A collection of essays and reviews entitled In Other Words was published in early 2007.
Most of the ideas he had for books occurred about ten years before he actually started work.
In 1989 Crowley and his wife Laurie Block founded Straight Ahead Pictures to produce media (film, video, radio and internet) on American history and culture. Crowley wrote scripts for short films and documentaries, and many historical documentaries for public television; his work received numerous awards and has been shown at the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and many others. His scripts include The World of Tomorrow (on the 1939 World's Fair), No Place to Hide (on the bomb shelter obsession), The Hindenburg (for HBO), and FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body (American fitness practices and beliefs over the decades; with Laurie Block).
Crowley's correspondence with literary critic Harold Bloom, and their mutual appreciation, led in 1993 to Crowley taking up a post at Yale University, where he taught courses in Utopian fiction, fiction writing, and screenplay writing. Bloom claimed on Contentville.com that Little, Big ranks among the five best novels by a living writer, and included Little, Big, Ægypt (The Solitudes), and Love & Sleep in his canon of literature (in the appendix to The Western Canon, 1994). In his Preface to Snake's-Hands, Bloom identifies Crowley as his "favorite contemporary writer", and the Ægypt series as his "favorite romance...after Little, Big".
His novel Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, published in 2017, was met with considerable critical recognition, earning the Mythopoeic Award in 2018 and receiving a nomination for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel the same year. Critics were notably generous in their assessments, with many drawing comparisons between the work's scope and ambition and that of Crowley's previous novels, Little, Big and the Aegypt series, situating it within the broader tradition of his most celebrated writing.
Some of his nonfiction writing appeared bimonthly in Harper's Magazine in the form of his "Easy Chair" column, which ended in 2016.
From 1993 he taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Crowley also taught at the Clarion West Writers' Workshop held annually in Seattle, Washington.
Personal life and death
Crowley married film producer and researcher Laurie Block in 1984, and their twins were born in 1987. They lived in Massachusetts.
Crowley died in Conway, Massachusetts on August 8, 2026, at the age of 83.
Awards
1982: Little, Big received the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award
1990: Great Work of Time received the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella
1992: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature
1997: Gone received the Locus Award for Best Short Story
1999: "La Grande oeuvre du temps", the French language edition of "Great Work of Time" (translated by Monique LeBailly), won the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, Nouvelle étrangère (Grand Prize for translated story)
2003: The Translator received the Italian Premio Flaiano
2006: World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement
2007: Bulgakov Award of Portal SF Assembly (Kyiv, Ukraine)
2018: "Spring Break" received the Edgar Award
2018: Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr received the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award
2021: Kra, Dar Duchesne dans les ruines de l’Ymr, the French language edition of Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, received the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire for Foreign Novel