Novelist │ Short-story Writer │ Journalist

William T. Vollmann is a monster, a monster of talent, ambition and accomplishment.
 
—Los Angeles Times

Distinctive for his boundless ambition and extraordinary output—23 books to date, counting the 7-volume, 3,352-page, Rising Up and Rising Down series—Vollmann fully inhabits two often polarized literary worlds. “One of the most unnerving aspects….is his combination of journalistic immediacy with profound moral inquiry” (Chicago Tribune). That duality has earned him comparisons to Thomas Pynchon.

In Vollmann's case, “journalistic immediacy” is a euphemism for suicide missions. Named by the New Yorker in 1999 as “one of the twenty best writers in America under 40,” Vollmann has achieved cult-status with legions of twenty-something readers for embracing taboo subject matter and/in highly dangerous situations.
 
Running with the Afghan guerrilla muhajadin against Soviet invaders; smoking crack with street prostitutes; nearly freezing to death, alone for two weeks in the North Pole; losing two friends while escaping gunfire in a Bosnian war zone—all “with a disregard for personal danger that would shame Hunter S. Thompson, or Jack London, or Errol Flynn” (Madison Smartt Bell, The New York Times Magazine). His denial of any death-wish aside, there is little Vollmann won’t try in the pursuit of authenticity.
 
His literary awards include, the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction for Europe Central (2005), the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction for the short story collection The Atlas (1996), and the 1988 Whiting Award for his cyberpunk debut You Bright and Risen Angels: A Cartoon (1987), Vollmann also won the 1989 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Award for an excerpt from Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award for Rising Up and Rising Down (2003) and Imperial (2009). His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Spin, Gear, Granta, Grand Street and Outside Magazine.
 
It would be enough—as it has for many writers—to give us a clear-eyed, inside view of these harrowing, at times tawdry events, to capitalize on the shock value, to engage us in voyeurism.   But Vollmann’s close and relentless study is driven by a sweeping philosophical and historical agenda, as in trying to find a “simple and practical moral calculus” for violence, in the voluminous, 23-years-in-the-making Rising Up and Rising Down (2003) for instance. Or, writing a seven-volume “symbolic history” of North America in his Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes (he’s written four of the seven so far).

“The Seven Dreams sequence promises to return us to the history of the North American continent in a form we’ve never seen before….it is likely to become one of the masterpieces of the century” (The Chicago Tribune). Other volumes in the series include The Ice Shirt (Volume I), Fathers and Crows (Volume 2), The Rifles (Volume 6) and Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (Volume 3).
 
Author of nine novels including The Royal Family (2000) and Butterfly Stories: A Novel (1993), Vollmann’s most recent book, the critically-acclaimed collection of related tales entitled Europe Central, won the 2005 National Book Award for fiction.  This “novel in stories” takes place mostly in Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. Using real-life figures in fictional stories, Vollmann examines fanaticism, and acts of resistance to Nazi and Communist totalitarianism.

“Scrupulously researched, rigorously designed, scarifingly voiced, this omnibus is heroic art, the writer’s courageous immersion in totalitarian ugliness to retrieve forgotten moral heroes. Full of terror and pity, Vollmann’s narratives go back beyond tragedy to the historical mastery of epic” (Judges’ Citation, National Book Foundation).
 
Born in Santa Monica, California in 1959, Vollmann attended Deep Springs College, Cornell University (summa cum laude) and did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Sacramento, California.
 
Selected Books:

• Kissing the Mask (Ecco Press, 2010)
  
• Imperial (Viking, 2009)
  
• Riding Toward Everywhere (Ecco Press, 2008)
  
• Poor People (Ecco Press, 2007)
  
• Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (W.W. Norton, 2006)
• Europe Central (Viking, 2005)
• Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means (abridged version, Ecco Press, 2004)
• Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (Viking, 2001)
• The Royal Family (Viking, 2000)
• The Atlas: People, Places, and Visions (Viking, 1996)
• The Rifles (Viking, 1994)
• Butterfly Stories: A Novel (Grove/Atlantic, 1993)
• Fathers and Crows (Viking, 1992)
• An Afghanistan Picture Show; or, How I Saved the World (Farrar, Straus, 1992)
• Whores for Gloria (Pantheon, 1991)
• The Ice Shirt (Viking, 1990)
• The Rainbow Stories (Atheneum, 1989)
• You Bright and Risen Angels: A Cartoon (Atheneum, 1987)

Awards and Honors

2010  Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award, Imperial
2007  Winner, Strauss Living Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters
2005  Winner, National Book Award, Europe Central
2005  Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award, Europe Central
2003  Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award, Rising Up and Rising Down
1989  Shiva Naipaul Memorial Award, Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes
1988  Whiting Writers Award, You Bright and Risen Angels

To read an interview with William Vollmann about his latest book, Imperial in the San Francisco Chronicle, click here.

To read about William Vollmann in the New York Times, click here.

To hear William Vollmann talking about riding the rails on NPR, click here.

To hear an interview with William Vollmann from KQED public radio, click here.