Matthew Theron Ruff (born September 8, 1965) is an American author of thriller, science fiction and comic novels, including The Mirage and Lovecraft Country, the latter having been adapted in 2020 by HBO into a TV series.

[1] In elementary school, he wrote a number of short stories, many of them starring his classmates in scenarios cribbed from movies or TV.

Ruff has said that reading these aloud in English class was his first experience performing in front of an audience and his first solid evidence that he had what it took to entertain people with his storytelling.

There was no overall plot, just a series of loosely linked episodes—a chapter about the boys and girls digging competing tunnel systems under the house would be followed by one in which they got infected by some weird flu strain and started passing out in the halls.

[4] In 1985, Ruff wrote a coming-of-age story set in Queens called "Today's Tom Sawyer", over the summer between his sophomore and junior years at Cornell.

Ruff based a character in the story on a female student in his class, and gave her a copy of the finished manuscript.

[4] Ruff's first novel, Fool on the Hill, is a fantasy that drew on his experiences living in Risley Residential College at Cornell.