Though never quite managing to penetrate the public consciousness to the extent that his contemporary Stephen King has, Peter Straub can still be considered one of the most commercially (and critically) successful genre writers of the past thirty years. He has consistently displayed a refreshing willingness to venture beyond the laboured prose and hackneyed situations found in so many examples of modern horror fiction and has instead established an impressively varied body of work that combines accessibility with genuine intelligence.

Peter Francis Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the second of March 1943, the son of a salesman and a nurse. He was b

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First published 28 June 2004

Citation: Murphy, Bernice. "Peter Straub". The Literary Encyclopedia. 28 June 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5767, accessed 21 November 2009.]