Stanley Elkin served as the Merle Kling Distinguished Professor of English at Washington University. He was born in New York, but grew up in Chicago. He did both his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Illinois, receiving a Ph.D. in 1961, and has been a member of Washington University's English faculty since 1960.

Elkin's fiction has been heralded for its imaginative poetic style. He is acclaimed as both an experimentalist, for his style, and a humorist, albeit a black one, for the comedic nature of his work. Always bordering on the outlandish, Elkin's work has not received the popular reception given that of many of his peers. It has, however, been greeted enthusiastically by critics and reviewers and brought him numerous literary awards, most recently a National Book Critics Circle Award for George Mills (1983). Elkin's reputation has risen steadily with the publication of each of his books and he is regarded as one of our finest contemporary novelists.