Busch, Frederick Matthew

▪ 2007

      American critic, editor, novelist, and short-story writer (b. Aug. 1, 1941, Brooklyn, N.Y.—d. Feb. 23, 2006, New York, N.Y.), examined aspects of life from diverse points of view in works that frequently featured families in crisis. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pa., in 1962 and in 1967 received an M.A. from Columbia University, New York City. He later taught literature at Colgate University, Hamilton, N.Y. In his second novel, Manual Labor (1974), a married couple grapples with a miscarriage. The same characters reappeared in Rounds (1979), in which their lives are intertwined with those of a doctor and a psychologist. Domestic Particulars: A Family Chronicle (1976), a collection of interlinked short stories, cataloged in vivid detail the everyday lives of people caught up in often futile attempts to express love. The Mutual Friend (1978), which represented a departure for Busch in terms of subject matter, was an imaginative account of the last years of Charles Dickens as purportedly told by his friend George Dolby. In the novella War Babies (1989), Busch returned to the subject of family relationships with the story of a man who attempts to rid himself of feelings of guilt over his now-dead father's imprisonment for treason. His later works included the novels Closing Arguments (1991), Long Way from Home (1993), Girls (1997), and The Night Inspector (1999), the short-story collection The Children in the Woods (1994), and A Dangerous Profession: A Book About the Writing Life (1998).

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