John Vernon is a novelist, memoirist and critic whose novels have explored both real and imagined signature moments in American history, from John Wesley Powell’s 1869 voyage of discovery through the Grand Canyon in The Last Canyon, to an 1872 confab between the mother and father of American poetry, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, in Peter Doyle, to Billy the Kid’s 1881 escape from the Lincoln County jail in Lucky Billy, to Baby Doe Tabor’s years of exile in a Leadville, Colorado mining shack in All for Love: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar. Two of his books have been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and he has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts grants. His work has appeared in Harper’s, Poetry, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, and many other magazines, journals and newspapers, and he often reviews new novels and memoirs for The New York Times Book Review.
