Biography

Harriet Scott Chessman is the author of three acclaimed novels. Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, published in eight foreign countries, became a #1 Booksense Pick in 2001.  Someone Not Really Her Mother, published in 2004, became a Good Morning America Read This! book club choice, a Readers Club of America book,and  a BookSense pick for Reading Groups; translated into Japanese and Dutch, Someone became one of The San Francisco Chronicle's Best Books of 2004.   Ohio Angels, her first novel, has been called "poetic and moving," "a lyrical debut.”  

Before starting to write fiction, Harriet taught English and American literature at Yale University from 1980 – 1991.  In 1989 she published The Public Is Invited to Dance (Stanford University Press), a scholarly interpretation of Gertrude Stein's experimental writings. Harriet has also published essays on Mary Cassatt and modernist writers, in addition to co-editing (with Catharine R. Stimpson)  The Library of America's writings of Gertrude Stein in 1998, hailed as a “generous and astute anthology” by Richard Howard in The New York Times.

Since 1991, Harriet has taught various courses in literature and creative writing at Bread Loaf School of English, Wesleyan University, and Yale University. She moved in 2002 from Connecticut to the Bay Area with her husband Bryan J. Wolf, an art historian of American art at Stanford University, and their three children.