Allan Gurganus is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His work includes Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Local Souls, often influenced by and set in his native North Carolina.

Since 1989, Gurganus’s novels, stories, and essays have become a singularly unified and living body of work. Known for dark humor, erotic candor, pictorial clarity, and folkloric sweep, his prose is widely translated. Gurganus’s stories, collected as “Piccoli eroi”, were just published to strong Italian reviews. France’s La Monde has called him “a Mark Twain for our age, hilariously clear-eyed, blessed with perfect pitch.” Fiction by Gurganus has inspired the greatest compliment of all: memorization and re-reading.

The number of new critical works, the theatrical and film treatments of his fiction, testify to its durable urgency. Adaptations have won four Emmy awards. Robert Wilson of The American Scholar has called Gurganus “the rightful heir”.