Scott Spencer (born September 1, 1945) is an American author who has written fourteen novels.
Two of Spencer's novels, Endless Love and Waking the Dead, have been adapted into films.
[1][2] In a contribution to The New York Times Book Review in 1980, Spencer said: "The general direction of the serious, literary novel may now be heading toward character and story, as novelists, in order to survive, take back from pulp fiction and the movies the rich subject matter which they so carelessly cast off, thinking they no longer needed it.
"[3] Joyce Carol Oates, writing about A Ship Made of Paper in The New Yorker, said: "Like Cheever, Spencer has imagined for his ... infatuated lover melodramatic crises that verge on the surreal; like John Updike, Spencer is a poet-celebrant of Eros, lyrically precise in his descriptions of lovers' fantasies, lovers' lovemaking, lovers' bodies ..."[4] The Wall Street Journal has said: "There are few novelists alive who use the English language as Scott Spencer does ... Every ache of feeling, every failed effort at restraint, every attempt at self-deception is captured in precise, beautifully cadenced prose.
For the past twenty years, he has lived in a small town in upstate New York.