Biography

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

Before becoming a fiction writer, Harriet taught English and American literature at Yale University and published The Public Is Invited to Dance, an interpretation of Gertrude Stein's experimental writings. She has published essays on Mary Cassatt and modernist writers, in addition to co-editing The Library of America's writings of Gertrude Stein.

Harriet has taught literature and creative writing at Bread Loaf School of English and Yale University. She moved in 2002 from Connecticut to the Bay Area with her husband Bryan Wolf, an art historian of American and Dutch art at Stanford University, and their three children. She has recently completed a new novel, about love’s mistakes, consolations, and grace, and is immersed in her fifth.