Illinois Authors

The Illinois Center for the Book banner

Barbara Croft

Born: 1944 in Des Moines, Iowa
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Barbara lives in Oak Park.

Biography: Barbara is the author of ''Moon's Crossing'', set at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Her work has been called 'breathtaking' by Tim O'Brien and 'magnificent' by Bharati Mukherjee. Croft has a writing style that is highly visual, poetic and spare.


Awards:
  • -- Drue Heinz Prize for Literature in 1998 for ''Necessary Fictions''
  • -- Society of Midland Authors award for adult fiction for ''Necessary Fictions''
  • -- Pirate's Alley William Faulkner Society, 2000, for "Columbia", an early novella version of ''Moon's Crossin

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Email: blcroft@aol.com
Barbara Croft on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=barbara++croft


Selected Titles

Moon's crossing /
ISBN: 0618341536 OCLC: 51969186

Houghton Mifflin, Boston : 2003.

"Jim Moon, a Union Army veteran and visionary, leaves his young wife and son in 1893 to visit the World's Columbian Exposition. There he discovers that the fair has attracted not only America's greatest artists and thinkers but its drifters and con men. In Pullman Town, a model city south of Chicago, Moon is drawn into a complex labor strike and sees that the bright future the fair promised is compromised by greed. Unable to recapture his early vision of America, Moon takes his own life, and in so doing generates a surprising love story between a common young woman and a corrupt policeman as well as a major upheaval for his neglected son"--Publisher's description.

Necessary fictions
ISBN: 9780822962465 OCLC: 607108725

University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh : ©1998.

A collection of stories on how people handle failure and wrong decisions. In one, a draft dodger from the Vietnam War tries to make up for fleeing the country by working as an orderly in a veterans' hospital, while in another a carpenter commits suicide when he fails to build the perfect house.

Necessary fictions /
ISBN: 0822940787 OCLC: 38602435

University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh : ©1998.

A collection of stories on how people handle failure and wrong decisions. In one, a draft dodger from the Vietnam War tries to make up for fleeing the country by working as an orderly in a veterans' hospital, while in another a carpenter commits suicide when he fails to build the perfect house.

Primary colors and other stories /
ISBN: 0898231248 OCLC: 25916308

New Rivers Press ; Minneapolis : 1991.

 

 

Accessibility