Millicent Dillon (née Gerson; born May 24, 1925) is an American writer."Millicent (Gerson) Dillon." ''Contemporary Authors Online''. Detroit: Gale, 2014. Retrieved via ''Biography in Context'' database, 2017-06-10. She was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

and studied physics at

Hunter College Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...

. She also worked variously at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

Standard Oil Company Standard Oil Company, Inc., was an American oil production, transportation, refining, and marketing company that operated from 1870 to 1911. At its height, Standard Oil was the largest petroleum company in the world, and its success made its co-f ...

, Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft, and Northrup Aircraft. In 1965, at the age of 40, Dillon enrolled in the creative writing program at

San Francisco State University San Francisco State University (commonly referred to as San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a public research university in San Francisco. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers 118 different b ...

. Subsequently, she taught at

Foothill College Foothill College is a public community college in Los Altos Hills, California. It is part of the Foothill–De Anza Community College District. It was founded on January 15, 1957, and offers 79 Associate degree programs, 1 Bachelor's degree pr ...

Los Altos, California Los Altos (; Spanish for "The Heights") is a city in Santa Clara County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The population was 31,625 according to the 2020 census. Most of the city's growth occurred between 1950 and 1980. Originally a ...

. She also worked at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

for nearly a decade. She became a full-time writer in 1983. She is best known for her scholarly works on the American writers

Jane Bowles Jane Bowles (; born Jane Sydney Auer; February 22, 1917 – May 4, 1973) was an American writer and playwright. Early life Born into a Jewish family in New York City on February 22, 1917, to Sydney Auer (father) and Claire Stajer (mother), Jane ...

and

Paul Bowles Paul Frederic Bowles (; December 30, 1910November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his ...

. These include a couple of biographies and a collection of letters, as well as ''The Viking Portable Paul and Jane Bowles'' (1994) which Dillon edited. Besides these, she also wrote short stories, novels and plays. Her novel ''Harry Gold'' (2000) was nominated for the PEN Faulkner Award. She won five

O. Henry awards The O. Henry Award is an annual American award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American short-story writer O. Henry. The ''PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories'' is an annual collection of the year's twenty best ...

and also received a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

.Biographical sketch
in "Millicent Dillon: An Inventory of her Papers" (

finding aid A finding aid, in the context of archival science, is an organization tool, a document containing detailed, indexed, and processed metadata and other information about a specific collection of records within an archive. Finding aids often consist o ...

for an

archival An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...

collection).

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center The Harry Ransom Center (until 1983 the Humanities Research Center) is an archive, library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the collection of literary and cultural artifacts from the Americas and Europe for the pur ...

, The University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved 2017-06-10. Dillon is the mother of the author

Wendy Lesser Wendy is a given name now generally given to girls in English-speaking countries. In Britain, Wendy appeared as a masculine name in a parish record in 1615. It was also used as a surname in Britain from at least the 17th century. Its popularity ...

References

American biographers American women biographers American women novelists 20th-century American non-fiction writers 21st-century American novelists 1925 births Living people 21st-century American women writers 20th-century American women writers PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winners 21st-century American non-fiction writers Hunter College alumni San Francisco State University alumni Princeton University staff {{US-writer-stub