No Time Like the Past

Richard Monaco is most wel-known for his best-selling Parsival novels, published between 1977 and 2012, two of which were Pulitzer Prize finalists. In a career spanning almost four decades, Monaco has published eighteen books with more on the way. He studied musical composition at Columbia University, was the editor of a national student newspaper and a poetry magazine. He also had a radio talk show based on his textbook The Logic of Poetry. He has taught and lectured on writing, and written Hollywood screenplays as well as stage plays. In 1979, he cofounded a NYC literary agency, and in 2015, he co-created Grand Central Review, a quarterly online literary journal. In these pages, Richard tells the story of how he came to be a writer: growing up in NYC and upstate New York, hitchhiking across America, cab driving in Manhattan, and finally finding success as a writer with his debut novel, Parsival or a Knight's Tale.