William Kotzwinkle books

Anthologies

Children’s Reading Order

E.T. Reading Order

Felonious Monk Mystery Reading Order

Graphic Novels

Inspector Mantis Mysteries Reading Order

Short Stories/Novellas

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Walter the Farting Dog Reading Order

William Kotzwinkle was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, studied journalism at Rider College and literature at Penn State, and spent time in Greenwich Village before eventually settling in rural coastal Maine with his wife, the writer Elizabeth Gundy. He came to wide public attention with The Fan Man in 1974, a cult novel about a deeply odd young man navigating 1970s New York, and followed it with Doctor Rat, which won the World Fantasy Award in 1977 and remains one of his most admired works for its fierce satirical portrait of laboratory animal experimentation.

His range is genuinely unusual. In the same career he wrote E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, a novelization that Steven Spielberg personally commissioned and that sold over three million copies, the darkly comic bear-as-literary-celebrity satire The Bear Went Over the Mountain, the noir fantasy Fata Morgana, and the picture book series Walter the Farting Dog, which spent over 75 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He also produced the Inspector Mantis mysteries for children, a Holmes-and-Watson parody set among Victorian insects, illustrated by his long-time collaborator Joe Servello.

Late in his career he returned to adult crime fiction with the Felonious Monk mystery series, following a quick-tempered former monk named Tommy Martini through darkly comic situations involving hired killers, crime lords, and spiritual confusion. Across all these forms, Kotzwinkle’s work shares a preoccupation with the tension between materialism and something more spiritual or mysterious, often filtered through humor and a willingness to go in completely unexpected directions.