Frederic Tuten (born December 2, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He has written five novels – The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), Tallien: A Brief Romance (1988), Tintin in the New World: A Romance (1993), Van Gogh's Bad Café (1997) and The Green Hour (2002) – as well as one book of inter-related short stories, "Self-Portraits: Fictions" (2010) and essays, many of the latter being about contemporary art.

Biography

Born in 1936 in The Bronx, New York City, New York, in the USA, Tuten is the son of a Sicilian mother and a French-Huguenot father. His father left their family when Tuten was young, and though they were never close, his father eventually was a part of Tuten's life before his death.

Tuten received his undergraduate degree from the City College of New York. After studying pre-Columbian art history at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and travelling through South America writing on Brazilian cinema, he earned a Ph.D. in 19th-century American literature from New York University, concentrating on Melville, Whitman, and James Fenimore Cooper, and taught literature and American cinema in France at the University of Paris VIII.


Tuten spent 15 years heading the graduate program in creative writing at the City College of New York, which he co-founded. In that capacity, he championed the work of students Walter Mosley, Oscar Hijuelos, Philip Graham, Aurelie Sheehan, Salar Abdoh, Ernesto Quiñonez, and many others. He also teaches classes on experimental writing at The New School. He is on the board of advisors for Guernica Magazine and executive editor of Smyles & Fish. Tuten's short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, Fiction, Granta, The New Review of Literature, and Tri-Quarterly. In 1973, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing and in 2001 was given the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In describing his usage of the past in his novels (where many of them are set), Tuten once stated:The fact that I don’t write about contemporary life doesn’t mean I’m any less taken up with it. I find it too limiting to write about contemporary life just in contemporary diction, however. I don’t think there’s enough flexibility. I can imagine writing about characters who feel passion for one another in a contemporary setting but I don’t, as yet, hear the language for that. But I’m always thinking about contemporary life vis a vis the way it looks in the past. I mean how it looks in the past is a reflection of what it is today. That’s what interests me. I think I’m always talking about present-day life, not only political life but about the quality of passion, the quality of all relationships and love.
Tuten is also a well-known figure within the art world. He has worked as an art and film critic in various venues such as the New York Times and Artforum and often incorporates allusions to these fields in his fiction as well. Tuten was a close personal friend of Roy Lichtenstein and published several essays on his work, as well as catalogue essays for many other artists including John Baldessari, Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, R.B. Kitaj, and David Salle.

Tuten currently resides in New York City's East Village.