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Thomas Williams
Thomas Williams (writer).jpg
Born (1926-11-15)November 15, 1926
Duluth, Minnesota, United States
Died October 23, 1990(1990-10-23) (aged 63)
Dover, New Hampshire, United States
Occupation Novelist, Short story writer
Genre fiction
Notable works The Hair of Harold Roux; Leah, New Hampshire

Thomas Williams (November 15, 1926 – October 23, 1990) was an American novelist. He won one U.S. National Book Award for Fiction—The Hair of Harold Roux split the 1975 award with Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers—and his last published novel, Moon Pinnace (1986), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Life and work

Born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1926, Williams and his family moved to New Hampshire when he was a child and he spent most of his life working and writing in that state, although he attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Chicago, and studied briefly in Paris. For most of his career he taught at the University of New Hampshire, and published eight novels during his lifetime. His students included among them Alice McDermott and John Irving. Irving wrote an introduction to a posthumous collection of Williams's collected stories, Leah, New Hampshire (1992).

Williams lived in Durham, New Hampshire and died of lung cancer at a hospital in Dover, New Hampshire when he was 63.

Williams is the father of writer and novelist Ann Joslin Williams who is the author of a collection of linked stories called The Woman in the Woods, which won the 2005 Spokane Prize. Joslin Williams' first novel Down From Cascom Mountain, was published in 2011. Like her father, she attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and (as of 2011) is a Professor at the University of New Hampshire.

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