Jim Shepard

How the Academy Saved Novelist Jim Shepard From Mainstream Success

By Boris Kachka

May 12, 2015

Jim Shepard. Photo: Barry Goldstein

Jim Shepard is one of the best writers you’ve never heard of. He’s a tenured professor at Williams College, a job he’s held happily for 32 years — raising his family in pastoral Massachusetts, teaching generations of admiring acolytes, writing dozens of short stories and seven lean novels (including the intense character studies Nosferatu and Project X) to his own strange, exacting specifications.