Happy Birthday to Novelist, Professor Stephen McCauley

Stephen McCauley was born today, June 26, in 1955. He is an American author. He has written seven novels, including Insignificant Others and The Object of My Affection, which was made into a film starring Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd.

He was raised outside Boston and went to public schools for his education. As an undergraduate, he attended the University of Vermont and then spent a year in France at the University of Nice.

McCauley worked a series of unrelated jobs including teaching yoga, working at a hotel, a kindergarten, and manning an ice cream stand. He worked as a travel agent for many years before moving to Brooklyn in the 1980s. There he attended adult learning centers to take some writing classes before enrolling in Columbia University's writing program. The writer Stephen Koch gave him the idea to begin work on his first novel.

His stories, articles and reviews have appeared in Gay Community News, Bay Windows, the Boston Phoenix, the New York Times Book Review, Vogue, House & Garden, Details, Vanity Fair, Harper's, and Travel and Leisure, among others.

His first novel, The Object of My Affection, was adapted in 1998 into a Hollywood feature film with the same title. A film based on his fourth novel, True Enough, served as the basis for a French-language film in 2007, titled La Verité ou Presque. His 1992 novel The Easy Way Out was adapted into the feature film L'Art de la fugue directed by Brice Cauvin.

McCauley is an alumnus of the Ragdale Foundation.

Today, McCauley serves as the Co-Director of the Creative Writing program at Brandeis University. He is a Professor of the Practice of English Fiction.

His latest novel, which just was released in May, is called, My Ex-Life. Maureen Corrigan from Fresh Air wrote, “I didn't know how much I needed a laugh until I began reading Stephen McCauley's new novel, My Ex-Life. This is the kind of witty, sparkling, sharp novel for which the verb ‘chortle’ was invented.”