Who

Moody is author of a number of successful novels, including The Ice Storm, Demonology, and Purple America.

Backstory

Hiram F. Moody III, or "Rick," went to St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and earned degrees at Brown and Columbia before checking himself into a mental hospital for depression and alcoholism. After sobering up, he worked at Simon & Schuster and Farrar, Straus & Giroux while writing his first novel, Garden State. Numerous publishing houses rejected the book before Pushcart Press accepted it, and Moody quit his line-editing gig at FSG almost immediately. His second novel, The Ice Storm, a sardonic chronicle of Connecticut suburban life in the 1970s, cemented his reputation; it was later adapted by Ang Lee into an acclaimed film of the same name starring Kevin Kline and Christina Ricci. Moody's 2002 work, The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, generated significant controversy after Dale Peck's excoriating review in the New Republic (see below). In 2005, Moody published another novel, The Diviners, to lackluster reviews, and a science fiction-tinged collection of novellas, Right Livelihoods, came out in June 2007. "Audacious and uneven," opined the LA Times.

Grudge

In Dale Peck's brutal takedown of The Black Veil, he famously called Moody "the worst writer of his generation," and claimed that the author's words "remain as meaningless to me as the Korean characters that paper the wall of a local restaurant." Moody was bothered enough to extract some revenge in his novel The Diviners, creating a character named Randall Tork, "an ugly, troll-like, unlovable homosexual wine critic who sits up nights contriving reviews that helplessly confess his spiritual infirmity." The two authors must be mellowing in their old age: A surprising truce was called in April '08, when Moody threw a cream pie in Peck's face on stage at a fundraiser.

Personal

He and his wife Amy Osborn divide their time between Fisher's Island in the middle of the Long Island Sound and a home in Park Slope.

Family ties

His grandfather, the original Hiram F. Moody, was the right-wing publisher of the New York Daily News decades ago.