About Me
Author’s Statement
David Vigoda has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the University of Utah. He directed The ‘Why It’s Great’ Writing Workshop and is a lifetime member of PEN American Center.
He has a BA from the University of Chicago, where he majored in the history of ideas after almost failing organic chemistry. He pursued a playwriting career in Chicago, London, and New York, achieving some success, including receipt from the BBC of the most polite rejection letter ever written. He also wrote poetry, much of which he still thinks is pretty good. Turning to the novel, his agent sold an early effort to a New York publisher that promptly failed (not because of his novel). Later he started his own publishing company, Collioure Books, but has so far published only two authors.
He has been an investment adviser since 1983, a fact relevant to Who Gathers the Breeze, Siding with the Angels, and the coda of The Road to Certain Shelter. Yes, he's related to Abe Vigoda the actor. He was his uncle, a fact not relevant to his novels, though they did collaborate on a TV sitcom pilot.
He has been happily married (since 1969!) to Liz Vigoda, studio potter, artist, and teacher. Together they produced Ben Vigoda who, after earning a PhD from the MIT Media Lab, founded Lyric Semiconductor, currently Analog Devices Lyric Labs, and then Gamalon, currently Product Genius AI. He in turn, with our wonderful daughter-in-law Lauren, produced Arden, Millar, and Max, the three grandest grandchildren on earth.
The stories I try to tell are not just those I am able to imagine, but those I believe should be told because they are (hopefully) not just beautiful and extraordinary and moving but important. They seek to remind us how we have arrived at our present place, our place in ourselves and in the world.
Years ago I heard the novelist Salman Rushdie (rhetorically) ask an audience, “Why don’t Americans write about the one thing everyone else in the world wants to know: What is America’s place in the world?” Later I reminded him of this, and he said something like, “Well, of course.” The question has haunted my writing, not just since then, but from my beginnings as a writer still in college a thousand years ago.
A review of my novel, Who Gathers the Breeze, ends: “...A solid literary achievement filled with philosophical, ethical, moral, and spiritual introspection.” (Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review) Reviews of my other books have noted the same. This (emphatically) does not mean that my novels don’t address the basic requirement of every good novel, which is to be exciting; what it does mean is that those who enjoy my fiction like the fact that it is about more than its story.