Martha McPhee

Martha McPhee (born 1965) is an American novelist whose work focuses on social and financial mobility in the United States.

Her second novel, Gorgeous Lies, was a 2002 National Book Award finalist. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. She teaches English at Hofstra University. Her work has been translated into languages including Dutch, German, Arabic, Italian.

Career

Martha McPhee received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to complete her first novel, Bright Angel Time, which was published in 1997. It was a New York Times Notable Book.

Her second novel, Gorgeous Lies, a follow-up to Bright Angel Time, was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award.

Her third novel, L'America, was published in 2006. Her fourth novel, Dear Money, set during the 2008-209 financial crisis, was published in 2010, and her fifth novel, An Elegant Woman, was published in 2020. Her work has appeared in several literary journals, including The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Tin House, and The American Scholar.

After her parents divorced and her mother remarried, McPhee lived with her mother, stepfather Dan Sullivan, three sisters, and five stepsisters on a farm outside of Princeton, New Jersey. Her mother and stepfather also had a daughter together, her half-sister Joan Sullivan.

McPhee graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in 1987. Several years later, she went to graduate school and received her M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1997.