Sam Savage

Samuel Phillips Savage (November 9, 1940 – January 17, 2019) was an American novelist and poet, best known for his 2006 novel Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife. Other published works are The Cry of the Sloth, The Criminal Life of Effie O, and Glass.

Life and work Samuel Phillips Savage was born in 1940 in Camden, South Carolina. His father, Henry Savage Jr., a lawyer by profession, was also an author, publishing several books of history and natural history. Savage graduated from Yale University in 1968 and was awarded the Warren Memorial High Scholarship Prize for "the B.A. candidate with highest scholastic rank." He subsequently studied philosophy at Yale and at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, receiving a Ph.D. from Yale University, with a dissertation on the political thought of Thomas Hobbes. He also taught at Yale, in his words "briefly and unhappily."

Before attending Yale he was poetry editor of Reflections, a small literary magazine published in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the early 1960s, and was active in the Civil Rights Movement. After leaving Yale, Savage spent several years in France. He returned to South Carolina in 1980, settling in the small coastal village of McClellanville. In 2004 he moved to Madison, Wisconsin. and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

His last novel, It Will End with Us, published in 2014, is a first-person narrative by an aging upper-class woman from the American South who is trying to discover the truth about her past from a collection of fragmentary, perhaps uncertain, memories. In 2016 the online literary journal Numero Cinq published "Zero Gravity", a collection of poems dating from 1981 to 2015.