BUSCH, FREDERICK

born Aug. 1, 1941, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S. in full Frederick Matthew Busch American critic, editor, novelist, and short-story writer whose work often examines aspects of family life from diverse points of view. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College (Allentown, Pennsylvania) in 1962 and received an M.A. in 1967 from Colgate University (Hamilton, New York), where he later taught literature. In his second novel, Manual Labor (1974), a married couple grapples with a miscarriage. The same characters reappear in Rounds (1979), in which their lives are intertwined with those of a doctor and a psychologist. Domestic Particulars: A Family Chronicle (1976), a collection of interlinked short stories, catalogs in vivid detail the everyday lives of people caught up in often futile attempts to express love. The Mutual Friend (1978), which represents a departure for Busch in terms of subject matter, is an imaginative account of the last years of Charles Dickens as purportedly told by his friend George Dolby. In the novella War Babies (1989), Busch returned to the subject of family relationships with the story of a man who attempts to rid himself of feelings of guilt over his now-dead father's imprisonment for treason. His later works include the novels Closing Arguments (1991), Long Way from Home (1993), Girls (1997), and The Night Inspector (1999), the short-story collection The Children in the Woods (1994), and A Dangerous Profession: A Book About the Writing Life (1998).