John A. Lauricella

John Lauricella is the author of six novels, many short stories, and one critical monograph. Born in Brooklyn a thousand years ago, he was taken away as a child to suburban New Jersey and eventually escaped the Pine Barrens Captivity to spend four undergraduate years at Colgate University, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. A so-called gap year featured rustication at a semi-famous private golf club, where he served as a caddie who knew the yardages and the breaks. Admission to Cornell University and the generous strength of a Sage Graduate Fellowship enabled him to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing. Later, he earned a Ph.D. in English Language & Literature at Cornell. His critical monograph, HOME GAMES: ESSAYS ON BASEBALL FICTION, was published in hardcover by McFarland & Co., Publishers, and selected chapters were reprinted in Contemporary American Authors (Gale Research) and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (Gale/Cengage Learning). In 2022, a revised edition of HOME GAMES appeared in paperback and a new hardcover edition of the revised text was published in 2023. Some of his short fiction has appeared in Arts & Letters, Stone Canoe, and Piltdown Review. His novels, HUNTING OLD SAMMIE (2013), 2094 (2014), THE PORNOGRAPHER'S APPRENTICE (2015), UNFORGETTABLE (2023), and THE CHINA PLOT (2023) are available as POD hardcover and paperback editions, and several are available as e-Books. His new novel (publication pending) is a mixed-genre work that includes elements of Bildungsroman, word-problem, mind-experiment, psychological evaluation, drama script, documentary, and several other narrative forms yet to be named, and ranges cyclically among deep past, recent past, and present time in representing sixty years of its protagonist’s life. Pride and humility, great good fortune and stymied ambitions, rampant ego and mindful gratitude are on display as its title character seeks the rhyme and reason of his existence. Lauricella has taught courses in the American and British novel, and in English Renaissance literature, as well as creative and expository writing, at several schools, including Cornell. He has served various academic and administrative agendas at Cornell Law School and in the University’s division of Alumni Affairs & Development. He lives in Ithaca, NY, where his beloved wife is a pedagogic legend at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell. If he ever holds a winning ticket, Lauricella promises to decamp to the Hawaiian Islands, where he will ponder the implications of his zodiac sign being, in the Greek tradition, Taurus and, in the Chinese tradition, Ox.