Novelist Francine Prose on Dropping Out of Harvard

Francine Prose is the author of inventive, comic novels. Blue Angel (2000), a humorous novel about sexual politics and academic life, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Other works include Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas (1997), Hunters & Gatherers (1995), Primitive People (1992), Bigfoot Dreams (1986), and Household Saints (1981), which was the basis for a 1993 movie starring Tracey Ullman. Her book A Changed Man (2005), is a novel about neo-Nazis and Holocaust survivors. Prose penned her first young adult novel, After (2003), as the story of a high school transformed into an Orwellian "re-education camp" after a Columbine-style shooting. She is also the author of the nonfiction book The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired (2002), which features profiles of Yoko Ono, Samuel Johnson's companion Hester Thrale, Salvador Dali's wife Gala, and Lewis Carroll's young friend Alice Liddell.