Researching Scott Spencer

In a contribution to The New York Times Book Review in 1980, Spencer said: "The general direction of the serious, literary novel may now be heading toward character and story, as novelists, in order to survive, take back from pulp fiction and the movies the rich subject matter which they so carelessly cast off, thinking they no longer needed it." Joyce Carol Oates, writing about A Ship Made of Paper in The New Yorker, said: "Like Cheever, Spencer has imagined for his... infatuated lover melodramatic crises that verge on the surreal; like John Updike, Spencer is a poet-celebrant of Eros, lyrically precise in his descriptions of lovers' fantasies, lovers' lovemaking, lovers' bodies..." The Wall Street Journal has said: "There are few novelists alive who use the English language as Scott Spencer does... Every ache of feeling, every failed effort at restraint, every attempt at self-deception is captured in precise, beautifully cadenced prose."

Spencer was born in Washington, D.C.. He has worked as a journalist and been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, O, The Oprah Magazine, and he is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone.

He has taught at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, Williams College, Bard College's Bard Prison Initiative, and the University of Virginia. Spencer attended the University of Illinois, Roosevelt University, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin. In 2004, he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. For the past twenty years, he has lived in a small town in upstate New York.

For some of his latest works, two sequenced horror novels, Spencer has chosen the pseudonym ″Chase Novak″.

Described as a 'wonderkid', he started his career at Oldham Athletic at the age of 10 working his way through the club's centre of excellence. In 2006, he moved to Everton for a fee of £220,000 and had loan spells with Yeovil Town and Macclesfield Town before being released by Everton just three years later in 2009. He then joined Rochdale on non-contract terms, later joining Southend United. He stayed for the remainder of the 2009–10 season and the start of the 2010–11 season, subsequently joining Lincoln City for the rest of the season before being released following the club's relegation from the Football League. After several trials, he eventually signed for Hyde. He received his first call-up to the England C national team in August 2011 whilst at Hyde.