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BORN FORT WAYNE, 22 AUGUST 1955
The tie. Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne and grew up in Hamilton Park — Edith Hamilton's family's old ground, a fact he has made part of his own mythology. He attended Butler University, graduated from Indiana University, and took his master's at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He taught at Iowa State, Harvard, and Syracuse before joining the University of Alabama's creative writing program in 1996; he retired there in 2020. His papers are at Indiana University's Lilly Library.
The books. His first book was a Fort Wayne imprint: At a Loss: Poems, published in Fort Wayne by the Windless Orchard in 1977, when he was twenty-two. The prose followed — Alive and Dead in Indiana (1984), Safety Patrol, Seeing Eye, Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle — and then the book that put the city in a famous title: Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List (Indiana University Press, 1990; expanded edition 1993), a collection of fictions steeped in the Fort Wayne of his growing up. (The title claim itself — the city's place on a supposed Nazi bombing list — is worked as a claim in this history's Stories Told, and not repeated as fact here.) His essays, The Flatness and Other Landscapes (University of Georgia Press, 2000), won the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction; Racing in Place (2008), Double-wide, his collected early stories (Indiana University Press, 2007), Four for a Quarter (2011), and Winesburg, Indiana followed. The strangest item on the shelf is Michael Martone (2005), a memoir assembled entirely from the contributor's notes he had written for magazines — a book-length version of the mock-biographical form he made his signature. Most recently he edited The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne (2020), returning the city's skywriting exhibition pilot to print. Nearly thirty books and chapbooks stand under his name.
Sources: University of Alabama Department of English, faculty biography and selected publications; Lilly Library, "Martone, Michael mss., 1968–2025," biographical note; HathiTrust record for At a Loss (Windless Orchard, 1977); Martone interview, A Midwestern Review (2008).