Andrew Holleran is the pseudonym of Eric Garber (born 1944),Goldstein (2006) erroneously gives his birth year as 1943. an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, born on the island of Aruba. Most of his adult life has been spent in New York City, Washington, D.C., and a small town in Florida. Following the critical and financial success of his first novel Dancer from the Dance in 1978, he became a prominent author of post-Stonewall gay literature.
He is the only surviving member of the gay writer's group The Violet Quill. Historically protective of his privacy, the author continues to use the pseudonym Andrew Holleran as a writer and public speaker. Holleran is often considered to be among the most acclaimed voices in American gay literature. In 2015, gay writer Larry Kramer called him "our Fitzgerald and Hemingway, but for one thing: He writes better than both of them".Kramer (2015).
Early life, education, military service Holleran was born and spent much of his childhood on the island of Aruba in the Dutch Caribbean, where his father worked for an oil company. He was raised a Catholic. After his father retired, the family moved to a small town in northern Florida in 1961.Holleran (2022), p. 81. After high school, he attended Harvard College, where he studied literature and American history. During his senior year, he met Peter Taylor, who taught creative writing. After graduating from Harvard with a BA in English in 1965, he followed Taylor to the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, in part to postpone "the horror of law school."Goldstein (2006).Mahtani (2006).Ortleb, p. 54.Holleran (2012).
At Iowa, where Holleran's teachers included Kurt Vonnegut and José Donoso, he formed a long-lasting friendship with fellow student Robert Ferro. None of Holleran's writings from this period were ever published, but he did obtain both an MA and an MFA from Iowa.Bergman, pp. 11-12. Then, after one year at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, which he found "a drag,"Bergman, p. 14. in 1968 Holleran found himself "in the clutches of a Kafkaesque nightmare" when he was drafted into the U.S. Army at the height of the Vietnam War. A "fluke of the computer system"Bergman, p. 15. sent him not to Vietnam but to West Germany.His army experience would later be fictionalized in a section of his autobiographical novel Nights in Aruba and in the short story "Sleeping Soldiers," published in The Violet Quill Reader. While in Germany he made his first sale of a short story, to The New Yorker.Bergman, p. 18; "The Holy Family," about a Christmas gathering, appeared in the January 2, 1971, issue of The New Yorker. It was also in Germany that he had his first experience of gay sex, which he recounted in a Christopher Street interview: One night I was in an N.C.O. club with this mad queen from Boston...He got me drunk and put me on the train to Ludwigshafen and dragged me to my first gay bar. It was stunning...I had sex that night and came back to the post so depressed that I took a three-hour-long shower. I felt that I had violated myself...After that experience in Germany I went back into the closet for a year.Ortleb, p 54.
Move to New York City Following his return to the United States after serving in the army, Holleran attended one additional semester of law school in Philadelphia, where by chance one night he discovered the gay part of town and developed a "case of 'Every Night Fever'" that "went on for four or five years. Bars seemed to be the most wonderful places on earth. I just had to walk into one to be in heaven. I would stand for hours. I was very shy and everyone seemed so glamorous."Ortleb, p. 54; "Every Night Fever" is a pun on the then-current movie Saturday Night Fever. After dropping out of law school and moving to New York City, his "fever" only intensified with his discovery of gay dance clubs and bathhouses and the gay scene at Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines.Bergman, p. 401: Holleran recalls, "I spent those years going to Fire Island as often as I could, visiting the Eagle's Nest, the Everard, and whatever dance club happened to be the one that winter." When not at a gym or out partying, dancing, and cruising for sex, he lived "in roach-infested apartments, working as a bartender, as a typist." He continued to write, thinking, after the appearance of his story in The New Yorker in 1971, that "they would publish me three times a year," but instead, "I had nothing published for seven years after that, until Dancer from the Dance," in 1978. "It's been a terrible struggle," he recalled.Ortleb, pp. 54-55.
Dancer from the Dance was a critical success, became a national bestseller, and launched Holleran's career as a writer. His subsequent, increasingly autobiographical novels, short stories, and essays reflect his concerns as an aging gay man and track his movements between homes in New York City, Washington, D.C., and the small town in Florida where his parents retired and where he continues to live.
Holleran was part of The Violet Quill, a prominent post-stonewall gay writer's group that met in 1980 and 1981 and included Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Felice Picano, Edmund White, and George Whitmore. Since the deaths of Picano and White in 2025, Holleran is the sole surviving member.Bergman, p. xi.White (1991): Edmund White remembers the group meeting from 1979 to 1983.
Literary career Dancer from the Dance
Dancer from the Dance (1978) takes place amid discotheques, gay bathhouses, fabulous parties, and seedy apartments in New York City and Fire Island. John Lahr in The New York Times called it
A meditation on ecstasy...constructed as a memoir of one very special member of this world: Malone, a paradigm of the romantic ideal...Malone becomes a circuit queen, but an aura of innocence not odium surrounds him. His delirium becomes a kind of saintliness; he gives love to the ugly as well as the beautiful...The Virgil who leads Malone through this inferno is an outrageous transvestite called Sutherland. Where Malone is beautiful, Sutherland is wise...And as we get to know this wonderful character, we see how his frivolity is a rebellion against the meaningless he finds around him.Lahr (1979).
The same review included a caustic dismissal of Larry Kramer's novel Faggots, set in the same milieu of gay New York and Fire Island, calling it, "sentence for sentence, some of the worst writing I've encountered in a published manuscript...an embarrassing fiasco." The two novels would continue to be linked and compared by readers and critics. Bill Goldstein in The New York Times in 2006 called the books "remarkably similar" in "erotic and pharmacological particulars, with Mr. Kramer channeling Theodore Dreiser or Upton Sinclair to Mr. Holleran's [F. Scott] Fitzgerald."For more recent comparisons of Dancer from the Dance and Faggots, see Greenwell (2022) and Barone (2022).
Dancer from the Dance became a breakthrough bestseller and is regarded as a classic of gay literature, enjoying a cult status in the gay community. William Johnson, program director of PEN America and former deputy director of Lambda Literary, calls Dancer from the Dance "our Catcher in the Rye, the book you read when you're young." Michael Cunningham calls it "the first gay novel everybody read...the first Big Gay Literary Sensation."Cunningham (2018).
In 1983, after a fall rendered his mother an invalid, he began living full-time in Florida, but kept a rent-controlled apartment on St. Mark's Place in the East Village.Holleran (2022), p. 80.Bergman, p. 405: Holleran recalls, "I'd not been in New York since 1981 for any length of time..."
Nights in Aruba Holleran's second novel, Nights in Aruba (1983), drew on his childhood in Aruba, his experience in the U.S. Army in Germany, his love-life and friendships in New York, and his ongoing relationships with his sister in Pennsylvania and his parents in Florida. The novel is not entirely autobiographical. One of the most vivid characters is "a tart-tongued older queen named Mister Friel"; Holleran says, "I took the greatest pleasure in the Friel sections, which were totally made up." (Mister Friel reappears in the short story "The Hamburger Man" in In September, the Light Changes.)
Ground Zero Ground Zero (1988) presented a collection of Holleran's essays, originally published in Christopher Street, written as the AIDS epidemic struck New York and decimated its gay community. A quarter-century after its publication, Garth Greenwell in The New Yorker assessed it as "one of the most important books to emerge from the plague," and wrote:The essays combine journalistic reportage in real time with an extraordinarily refined literary sensibility, and the conjunction is startling. As Holleran, along with the rest of gay New York, slowly realizes the scope of the catastrophe, the effect is something like reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's notes on the apocalypse.Greenwell (2020).
Among the essays is Holleran's reflection on Charles Ludlam, which Greenwell calls "the most concise and profound discussion of camp aesthetics I know."
The Beauty of Men In his third novel, The Beauty of Men (1996), a 47-year-old gay man living in a small town in Florida visits his quadriplegic mother at a nursing home in nearby Gainesville, remembers his friends in New York—most of them dead from AIDS—and agonizes over an unrequited obsession with a younger gay man. Peter Parker in The New York Times found it "extremely well written, and in its muted way an altogether more impressive novel than Dancer From the Dance."Parker (1999). Alan Hollinghurst called it a "beautiful and desolating tally of what makes up a life, what images and obsessions and childlike hungers, beyond anything that it is respectable or usual to admit, haunt it and impel it and obstruct it."Hollingshurst (1996). The novel received the 1996 Ferro-Grumley Award.
In September, the Light Changes In September, the Light Changes (1999) was a collection of short stories, most of them published for the first time. Peter Parker in The New York Times called the book "unflinching, provocative, witty and shrewd."
Grief After the death of his mother, Holleran taught creative writing at American University in Washington, D.C. at the invitation of longtime friend and colleague Richard McCann. Holleran's grief at his mother's death in Florida, his observations on Washington and its gay residents, together with a meditation on the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln, inform his short novel Grief (2006). Elizabeth Hand was struck by Holleran's evocation of the city: "Like Cavafy leading one through the alleys and restaurants and history of Alexandria, Egypt, Holleran's narrator is a guide to the labyrinth of ambition, death, art and desire that lies within L'Enfant's carefully executed grid of streets and parks."Hand (2006).
Grief received the 2007 Stonewall Book Award. Also in 2007, Holleran received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle.
The Kingdom of Sand