Evan S. Connell

Evan Shelby Connell, Jr. (born August 17, 1924, Kansas City, Missouri) is an American novelist, poet, and short story-writer. He has also published under the name Evan S. Connell Jr. Connell is the only son of Evan S. Connell Sr. (1890-1974), a physician, and his wife, Ruth Elton Connell. He has a sister, Barbara (Mrs. Matthew Zimmermann, to whom he dedicated his novel Mrs. Bridge). He graduated from Southwest High School in Kansas City in 1941 a... more

Evan Shelby Connell, Jr. (born August 17, 1924, Kansas City, Missouri) is an American novelist, poet, and short story-writer. He has also published under the name Evan S. Connell Jr. Connell is the only son of Evan S. Connell Sr. (1890-1974), a physician, and his wife, Ruth Elton Connell. He has a sister, Barbara (Mrs. Matthew Zimmermann, to whom he dedicated his novel Mrs. Bridge). He graduated from Southwest High School in Kansas City in 1941 and attended Dartmouth College but graduated from the University of Kansas in 1947, with a B.A. in English. He also studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York and Stanford University in California. Connell lives in New Mexico. In 2009, he was nominated for the third Man Booker International Prize. Connell's novels Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969) are bittersweet, gently satirical portraits of a conventional, unimaginative upper middle class couple living in Kansas City from the 1920s to the 1940s. The couple tries to... less