21st-century American novelists

Dennis Lehane (born August 4, 1965) is an American author. He has published more than a dozen novels; the first several were a series of mysteries featuring recurring characters, including A Drink Before the War. Four of his novels have been adapted into films of the same names: Clint Eastwood's Mystic River (2003), Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010), and Gone Baby Gone (2007) and Live by Night (2016), both directed by Ben Affleck. His short story "Animal Rescue" was also adapted into the film The Drop, noted for being the final film role for actor James Gandolfini.

Russell Earl Banks (March 28, 1940 – January 8, 2023) was an American writer of fiction and poetry. His novels are known for "detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters". His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, and often reflect "moral themes and personal relationships".Banks was a member of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Alison Stewart Lurie (September 3, 1926 – December 3, 2020) was an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she wrote many non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress.

William Floyd Weld (born July 31, 1945) is an American attorney, businessman, author, and politician who served as the 68th Governor of Massachusetts from 1991 to 1997.
A Harvard and Oxford graduate, Weld began his career as legal counsel to the United States House Committee on the Judiciary before becoming the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts and later, the United States Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division. He worked on a series of high-profile public corruption cases and later resigned in protest of an ethics scandal and associated investigations into Attorney General Edwin Meese.
Weld was elected Governor of Massachusetts in 1990. In the 1994 election, he was reelected by the largest margin of victory in Massachusetts history. In 1996, he was the Republican nominee for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, losing to Democratic incumbent John Kerry. Weld resigned as governor in 1997 to focus on his nomination by President Bill Clinton to serve as United States Ambassador to Mexico; due to opposition by socially conservative Senate Foreign Relations committee Chairman Jesse Helms, he was denied a hearing before the Foreign Relations committee and withdrew his nomination. After moving to New York in 2000, Weld sought the Republican nomination for Governor of New York in the 2006 election; when the Republican Party instead endorsed John Faso, Weld withdrew from the race.
Weld became involved in presidential politics in later years. In 2016, he left the Republican Party to become the Libertarian Party running mate of former Governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson. They received nearly 4.5 million votes, the highest number for a Libertarian ticket, and the best for any third-party ticket since 1996 with Ross Perot's Reform Party.
Returning to the Republican Party, Weld announced in April 2019 that he would challenge President Donald Trump in the 2020 Republican primaries, launching his campaign. He won his first and only delegate of the primaries in the Iowa caucus in February, making him the first Republican since Pat Buchanan in 1992 to win a delegate while running against an incumbent president. Weld suspended his campaign on March 18, 2020, shortly after Trump's delegate count made him the presumptive Republican nominee, and ultimately placed second in 22 states and second overall with 2.4% of the popular vote, collecting relevant percentages of up to 13% in protest-votes against Trump in several states. He endorsed Democrat Joe Biden seven months later.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (née Kroeber; KROH-bər lə GWIN; October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. She was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin said she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist".Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, to author Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber. Having earned a master's degree in French, Le Guin began doctoral studies but abandoned these after her marriage in 1953 to historian Charles Le Guin. She began writing full-time in the late 1950s and achieved major critical and commercial success with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which have been described by Harold Bloom as her masterpieces. For the latter volume, Le Guin won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, becoming the first woman to do so. Several more works set in Earthsea or the Hainish universe followed; others included books set in the fictional country of Orsinia, several works for children, and many anthologies.
Cultural anthropology, Taoism, feminism, and the writings of Carl Jung all had a strong influence on Le Guin's work. Many of her stories used anthropologists or cultural observers as protagonists, and Taoist ideas about balance and equilibrium have been identified in several writings. Le Guin often subverted typical speculative fiction tropes, such as through her use of dark-skinned protagonists in Earthsea, and also used unusual stylistic or structural devices in books such as the experimental work Always Coming Home (1985). Social and political themes, including race, gender, sexuality, and coming of age were prominent in her writing. She explored alternative political structures in many stories, such as in the philosophical short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973) and the anarchist utopian novel The Dispossessed (1974).
Le Guin's writing was enormously influential in the field of speculative fiction, and has been the subject of intense critical attention. She received numerous accolades, including eight Hugos, six Nebulas, and twenty-four Locus Awards, and in 2003 became the second woman honored as a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The U.S. Library of Congress named her a Living Legend in 2000, and in 2014, she won the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Le Guin influenced many other authors, including Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, and Iain Banks. After her death in 2018, critic John Clute wrote that Le Guin had "presided over American science fiction for nearly half a century", while author Michael Chabon referred to her as the "greatest American writer of her generation".

Andrew M. Greeley (February 5, 1928 – May 29, 2013) was an American Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and popular novelist. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago, and a research associate with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC).
For many years, Greeley wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and contributed regularly to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal.

Mary Abigail Padgett (born May 13, 1942, in Vincennes, Indiana) is an American author of mystery novels who features in Great Women Mystery Writers (2007)

Mark Dunn (born July 12, 1956, in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American author and playwright. He studied film at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) followed by post-graduate work in screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin moving to New York in 1987 where he worked in the New York Public Library while writing plays in his free time.
Among the 35 plays Dunn has written (as of 2023), Belles and Five Tellers Dancing in the Rain have been produced over one hundred and fifty times. Dunn served as playwright-in-residence with the New Jersey Repertory Company and the Community Theatre League in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.Dunn is the author of the popular "progressively lipogrammatic" novel Ella Minnow Pea (2001).
In 1998, Dunn sued the writers, distributors and producers of The Truman Show, claiming that the story was based on a play he had written and performed Off-Broadway in 1992, Frank's Life.

Barbara Brooks Wallace (December 3, 1922 – November 27, 2018) was an American children's writer. She won the NLAPW Children's Book Award and International Youth Library "Best of the Best" for Claudia (2001) and William Allen White Children's Book Award for Peppermints in the Parlor (1983).

Edmund Leroy "Mike" Keeley (February 5, 1928 – February 23, 2022) was an American novelist, translator, and essayist, a poet, and Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University. He was a noted expert on the Greek poets C. P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, and Yannis Ritsos, and on post-Second World War Greek history.