21st-century American novelists

Jack Matthews (22 July 1925 – 28 November 2013) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright and former professor. He published 7 novels, 11 story collections, a novella, and 8 volumes of essays. He was an avid book collector, and many of his book finds served as a basis for his essays and the historical topics he explored in his fiction. His 1972 novel The Charisma Campaigns was nominated by Walker Percy for the National Book Award. He has often made 19th century America and the Civil War period the setting for his fiction, starting with his 1981 novel Sassafras and most recently with the 2011 novel Gambler's Nephew (which tells the story of how an abolitionist accidentally kills an escaped slave) and a 2015 story collection Soldier Boys: Tales of the Civil War. His plays have been performed at multiple theaters around the country.

George Palmer Garrett (June 11, 1929 – May 25, 2008) was an American poet and novelist. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2004. His novels include The Finished Man, Double Vision, and the Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun. He worked as a book reviewer and screenwriter, and taught at Cambridge University and, for many years, at the University of Virginia. He is the subject of critical books by R. H. W. Dillard, Casey Clabough, and Irving Malin.

Carolyn See (née Laws; January 13, 1934 – July 13, 2016) was a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of ten books, including the memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, an advice book on writing, Making a Literary Life, and the novels There Will Never Be Another You, Golden Days, and The Handyman. See was also a book critic for the Washington Post for 27 years.

Meg Rosoff (born 16 October 1956) is an American writer based in London, United Kingdom. She is best known for the novel How I Live Now (Puffin, 2004), which won the Guardian Prize, Printz Award, and Branford Boase Award and made the Whitbread Awards shortlist. Her second novel, Just in Case (Penguin, 2006), won the annual Carnegie Medal from the British librarians recognising the year's best children's book published in the UK.

Andrea Barrett (born November 16, 1954) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Archangel and Natural History were finalists for the Story Prize.

Julia Glass (born March 23, 1956) is an American novelist. Her debut novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002.Glass followed Three Junes with a second novel, The Whole World Over, in 2006, set in the same Bank Street–Greenwich Village universe, with three interwoven stories featuring several characters from Three Junes. Her third novel, I See You Everywhere, was published in 2008; her fourth, The Widower's Tale, in 2010; her fifth, And the Dark Sacred Night, in 2014; her sixth, The House Among the Trees, in 2017; her seventh, Vigil Harbor, in 2022.
Glass was born in Boston, grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts and Lincoln, Massachusetts, and attended Concord Academy. She graduated from Yale in 1978. Intending to become a painter, she moved to New York City, where she lived for many years, painting in a small studio in Brooklyn and supporting herself as a freelance editor and copy editor, including several years in the copy department of Cosmopolitan magazine. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with her partner, the photographer Dennis Cowley, and their two children, and works as a freelance journalist and editor, while teaching fiction writing at Emerson College. She is a previous winner of the William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

Christopher Travis Rice (born March 11, 1978) is an American author. Rice made his fiction debut in 2000 with the bestselling A Density of Souls, going on to write many more novels, including The Snow Garden, The Heavens Rise, The Vines, as well as the Burning Girl series. His work spans multiple genres, including suspense, crime, supernatural thriller, and erotic romance. With his mother Anne Rice, he is the co-author of the historical-horror novels Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra and its sequel, Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris.

Susan Minot (born December 7, 1956) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, screenwriter and painter.

John Dufresne (born January 30, 1948) is an American author of French Canadian descent born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He graduated from Worcester State College in 1970 and the University of Arkansas in 1984. He is a professor in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program of the English Department at Florida International University. In 2012, he won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for his work.

Katherine Irene Kurtz (born October 18, 1944) is an American fantasy writer, author of sixteen historical fantasy novels in the Deryni series, as well as occult and urban fantasy. Resident in Ireland for over twenty years, she moved to Virginia in 2007.