Donald J Snyder (1950 - )

Genre: Non-Fiction, General Fiction

Don Snyder, now a resident of Scarborough, Maine, and New Brunswick, was born in Hatfield, Pennsylvania, on 11 Aug. 1950, one of twins, to a mother who died days later of complications from the pregnancy. He was raised in Bangor, graduated from Colby College in 1972, and worked as editor of the Bar Harbor Times, as reporter for a Portland weekly, and as a freelance writer. After achieving his dream of participating in the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, he took a one-year job teaching writing at Colby, which was followed the next year by a one-year teaching job at the University of Maine at Orono. In 1989, he was hired for a tenure-track English and creative writing position at Colgate University (Hamilton, NY). When he failed to get tenure in 1992, he and his family -- wife Colleen, daughters Erin, Nell, and Cara (then in utero), and son Jack -- moved back to Maine and went on food stamps and he took jobs as a greenskeeper, construction laborer, house painter, and cottage caretaker for summer people. His big writing and financial break came with the Harper's magazine publication in Nov. 1995 of an excerpt from his journal, which expanded to become The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found, published in 1997.

Snyder's twin, David, is an ordained Lutheran minister and past executive director of Habitat for Humanity in Portland, Maine.

Edgar Allen Beem provides a long profile on Don Snyder in the Boston Globe, 1999. Besides writing memoirs and novels, Snyder also teaches screenwriting, fiction writing and nonfiction prose in the low residence MFA program at Western Connecticut University.

Snyder's memoirs are The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found (1997), which recounts the story of his life's unraveling after he lost the job at Colgate and Of Time and Memory: A Mother's Story (1999), about his mother's life, his parents' courtship, and the mystery surrounding her death. The New York Times reviewed Cliff Walk, and provides a Cliff Walk excerpt, and the Colby College magazine also has a Cliff Walk review. Of Time and Memory is reviewed in the New York Times.

Snyder's other books are a biography, A Soldier's Disgrace (1987), in which he tries to restore the lost honor of a Maine man convicted of treason after the Korean War; and novels Veterans Park (1987), about a pitching phenom who passes through the minors in rural Maine and falls in love with free-spirited daughter of local potato farmer; From the Point (1988), a novel of the relationships among friends and family during the summer of 1967; Fallen Angel (2001), a Christmas-time tale of redemption, which became a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV show; Night Crossing (2001), a suspense novel of terrorism, set in Omagh (Ireland) in the aftermath of an actual car bombing that killed 29 people and injured 330 in August 1998; and Winter Dreams (2004), a story of love and golf about a young man raised in a Benedictine orphanage. An excerpt of Night Crossing is online.


Last Update: 07/23/2007

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