John Casey is the author of the story collection Testimony and Demeanor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979) and the novels An American Romance (Atheneum, 1977), Spartina (Knopf, 1989) and The Half-Life of Happiness (Knopf, 1998). He is also a contributor to a number of magazines, including The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Harpers, Esquire, Ploughshares, and Shenandoah. He is the translator of Alessandro Boffa’s You’re an Animal Viskovitz! (Knopf, 2002) and Linda Ferri’s Enchantments (Knopf, 2005). A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Casey was awarded a Friends of American Writers Award for Testimony and Demeanor, and he received the 1989 National Book Award for Spartina. In 1990 Casey became a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He received the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992.

A graduate of Harvard College (BA, 1962), Harvard Law School (LLB, 1965) and the University of Iowa Creative Writing program (MFA, 1968), Casey is Professor of English Literature at the University of Virginia and a regular instructor of fiction writing at the Sewanee Writers Conference at the University of the South. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.