Mark Costello (Oct. 25, 1936—July 3, 2023), a native of Decatur, Illinois, is the author of the story collections The Murphy Stories (University of Illinois Press, 1973),[1] which won the St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, and Middle Murphy (University of Illinois Press, 1991).
Costello taught for many years at the University of Illinois at Urbana as a creative writing instructor and was a visiting writer at many universities and colleges.
He held the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and was writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop for one year.
[citation needed] The stories are set in central Illinois and feature a hard-drinking, hard-living character, Michael Murphy.
He is not related to the Mark Costello who wrote Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (1990), with David Foster Wallace.