Peter Francis Straub (; March 2, 1943 – September 4, 2022) was an American novelist and poet. He wrote numerous horror and supernatural fiction novels, including Julia and Ghost Story, as well as The Talisman, which he co-wrote with Stephen King. Straub received such literary honors as the Bram Stoker Award, World Fantasy Award, and International Horror Guild Award. Per his New York Times obituary, he "brought a poet's sensibility to stories about ghosts, demons and other things that go bump in the night."
Early life and education
Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of Gordon Anthony Straub and Elvena (Nilsestuen) Straub. At the age of seven, Straub was struck by a car, sustaining serious injuries. He was hospitalized for several months and used a wheelchair until he had re-learned how to walk. Straub has said that the accident made him prematurely aware of his own mortality.
Straub read voraciously from an early age, but his literary interests did not please his parents; his father hoped that he would grow up to be a professional athlete, while his mother wanted him to be a Lutheran minister. He attended Milwaukee Country Day School on a scholarship, and, during his time there, began writing.
Straub attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he discovered "the various joys of Henry James, William Carlos Williams, and the Texas blues-rocker Steve Miller, a great & joyous character who lived across the street." He earned an honors BA in English in 1965 and an MA at Columbia University a year later. He briefly taught English at Milwaukee Country Day, where he "enjoyed a minor but temporary success as Mr. Chips-cum-jalapenos, largely due to the absolute freedom given him by the administration and his affection for his students, who faithfully followed him as he struck matches and led them into caves named Lawrence, Forster, Brontë, Thackeray, etc., etc. On his off-hours, he fell in love with poetry, especially John Ashbery’s poetry, and wrote imitations of same." In 1969 he moved to Dublin, Ireland to work on a PhD and start writing professionally.
Career
After mixed success with two attempts at literary mainstream novels in the mid-1970s (Marriages and Under Venus), Straub dabbled in the supernatural for the first time with Julia (1975). He then wrote If You Could See Me Now (1977), and came to widespread public attention with his fifth novel, Ghost Story (1979), which was a critical success and was later loosely adapted into a 1981 film starring Fred Astaire. In 1980, he published the fantasy Shadowland. After returning to America he wrote Floating Dragon, which won the August Derleth Award. He coauthored the horror-fantasy The Talisman with his longtime friend Stephen King.
After a fallow period, Straub re-emerged in 1988 with Koko, a non-supernatural (though horrific) novel about the Vietnam war. Koko was followed in the early 1990s by the related novels Mystery and The Throat, which together with Koko make up the "Blue Rose Trilogy". These complex and intertwined novels extended Straub's experiments with metafiction and unreliable narrators.
in 1996, Straub published the mainstream thriller The Hellfire Club. In 1999, Straub published Mr. X, a novel with a doppelgänger theme. The novel pays homage to H. P. Lovecraft, as the eponymous Mr. X writes in a similar style. In 2001, Straub and King rejoined forces for Black House, a loose sequel to The Talisman which tied that book in with King's Dark Tower Series. 2003 saw the publication of Lost Boy, Lost Girl followed by the related In the Night Room a year later. Both won the Bram Stoker Award.
Straub edited the Library of America volume H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (2005). In 2009, Straub edited the Library of America anthology American Fantastic Tales.
Straub published several books of poetry. My Life in Pictures appeared in 1971 as part of a series of six poetry pamphlets Straub published with his friend Thomas Tessier under the Seafront Press imprint while living in Dublin. In 1972 the more substantial chapbook Ishmael was published by Turret Books in London. Straub's third book of poetry, Open Air, appeared later that same year from Irish University Press. The collection Leeson Park and Belsize Square: Poems 1970 – 1975 was published by Underwood-Miller in October 1983. It reprinted much of Ishmael along with previously uncollected poems, but none of the poems from Open Air.