Pete Dexter

Pete Dexter (born 1943) is an American novelist. He was the recipient of the 1988 National Book Award for Fiction for his novel Paris Trout. Dexter was born in Pontiac, Michigan. After his father died, when Dexter was four, he and his mother moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, where she married a college physics professor. He was a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, the The Sacramento Bee, and syndicated to many newspapers such as the Seattl... more

Pete Dexter (born 1943) is an American novelist. He was the recipient of the 1988 National Book Award for Fiction for his novel Paris Trout. Dexter was born in Pontiac, Michigan. After his father died, when Dexter was four, he and his mother moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, where she married a college physics professor. He was a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, the The Sacramento Bee, and syndicated to many newspapers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Prior to that he worked for what is now The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Florida, but quit in 1972 because the paper's owners forced the editorial page editor to endorse Richard Nixon over George McGovern. He began writing fiction after a life-changing 1981 incident in which thirty drunken Philadelphians in the neighborhood of Grays Ferry, armed with baseball bats and upset by a recent column about a drug deal-gone-wrong murder, beat the writer severely. The brother of the homicide victim was a bartender at a Grays... less