Rick Moody

Rick Moody
Moody in Lyon, France - May 2009
Born	Hiram Frederick Moody III (1961-10-18) October 18, 1961 (age 55) New York City, United States
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, essayist, composer
Nationality	American
Period	1992 – present

Hiram Frederick "Rick" Moody III (born October 18, 1961) is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought him widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of the same title. Many of his works have been praised by fellow writers and critics alike, and in 1999 The New Yorker chose him as one of America's most talented young writers, placing him on their "20 Writers for the 21st Century" list.

Moody was born in New York City, the son of Margaret Maureen (Flynn) and Hiram Frederick Moody, Jr. He grew up in several Connecticut suburbs, including Darien and New Canaan, where he later set stories and novels. He graduated from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and Brown University.

He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1986; nearly two decades later he would criticize the program in an essay in The Atlantic Monthly. Soon after finishing his thesis, he checked himself into a mental hospital for alcoholism. Once sober and while working for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he wrote his first novel, 1992's Garden State, about young people growing up in the industrial wasteland of northern New Jersey, where he was living at the time. In his introduction to a reprint of the novel, he called it the most "naked" thing he has written.Garden State won the Pushcart Editor's Choice Award.