Charles Baxter, a novelist best known for realistic fiction about midwestern characters, is often called a writer’s writer. In an interview with The Atlantic, he said, “I feel as if I’m in a familiar locale when I’m writing short stories, since I often feel as if I know where everything is. I love the directness of the form…for me, stories begin when things start to go wrong.” His characters often seem ordinary until a chance encounter, a persistent nagging or a tilt in their world order pushes them to make sudden, feverish decisions.

In discussing short fiction, Baxter said, “short stories don’t have the time or the space to establish characters in detail….Very short stories have to get something into motion quickly, which means that you don’t have time for elaborate portraiture, with the result that the situation is likely to be more powerful than the character who finds himself in that situation. And that set-up, in turn, means that the character will probably react impulsively instead of acting or deciding. It’s all built into the structure.”

Born in 1947 in Minneapolis, Baxter lost his father as a toddler, and his mother remarried a wealthy attorney who moved Charles and his two older brothers to an estate in suburban Excelsior called World’s End. “There often wasn't much for me to do except go out into these woods or fields or watch the sheep or read. So I did a good deal of that,” Baxter recalled. He also noted that his stepfather had an enormous library of first editions and often lectured the family on Nietzsche at dinner. 

He attended Macalester College in St. Paul and then earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Buffalo in 1974. He began his university teaching career at Wayne State University. After 14 years, he moved to the University of Michigan to direct the creative writing MFA program for many years. In 2003, he moved to the University of Minnesota and retired in 2020, after teaching his last 2 months over Zoom because of the pandemic.

His was married to a teacher in a children’s psychiatric hospital; they had one son together and later divorced.

He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story in 2021.

He has published six novels, six short story collections, two books of essays, and three books of poetry, detailed here on his website: https://charlesbaxter.com/books/