John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942, his father then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky, and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 14th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2005. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He has thrice won the World Fantasy Award: for Best Novella (Great Work of Time), novel (Little, Big) and in 2006 the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. He finds it more gratifying that most of his work is still in print: the Ægypt Cycle, which began to appear in 1987 with Ægypt, and has just concluded with Endless Things (now available from Small Beer Press), will begin appearing in a new uniform edition from Overlook Press starting in September with The Solitudes, the true title of the first volume. Presently, Lifetime Achievement or no, he is at work on a new novel, about workers building a bomber during World War II.

In addition to fiction, Crowley has issued a volume of nonfiction mostly about books (In Other Words), and for many years he worked as a writer of films, mainly historical documentaries. These include The World of Tomorrow (the 1939 World’s Fair) and FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body (produced and directed by his wife Laurie Block). He lives in Massachusetts.