He developed a stutter that he eventually managed to control, most of the time. At the age of seven Peter was hit by a car and injured so severely he had to relearn how to walk after spending a year in a wheelchair. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin his father, Gordon, was a salesman, his mother, Elvina (nee Nilsestuen), was a nurse. The core of Straub’s writing might be found in his early years. What was unsaid was that Roth wrote about such things too his late bestseller The Plot Against America is a classic alternate-history science-fiction novel. Stephen King, with whom Straub collaborated on two novels, called him “a modern writer who was the equal of, say, Philip Roth, though he wrote about fantastic things”. There was always the sense of his reluctance to be pigeonholed as a “genre” novelist. One of his early influences was Henry James, whose The Turn of the Screw is one of the greatest ghost stories, but he would also cite many other classic novelists, as well as poets such as John Ashbery and William Carlos Williams. Straub’s use of his insights was amplified by the quality of his prose.
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