Bruce Duffy

Bruce Duffy (1951-2022) was the author of the autobiographical novel Last Comes the Egg (1997), and Disaster Was My God (2011), a novel based on the life and work of the poet Arthur Rimbaud. An only child raised in a Catholic middle-class family in suburban Maryland, Duffy saw the 1962 death of his mother—essentially by medical malpractice— as what pushed him to be a writer. Duffy graduated from the University of Maryland in 1973, and hitchhiked twice across the United States, worked construction, washed dishes, hopped freight trains with hoboes, and reported stories that took him to Haiti, Bosnia, and Taliban Afghanistan. Writing in Salon, Joyce Carol Oates named The World As I Found It as one of “five great nonfiction novels,” calling it “one of the most ambitious first novels ever published.” Duffy won the Whiting Writers’ Award and a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award.
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