David Robert Plante (born March 4, 1940, in Providence, Rhode Island) is an American novelist, diarist, and memoirist of both French-Canadian and North American Indian descent. He graduated from Boston College and the Université catholique de Louvain. He taught creative writing at Columbia University before retiring.

Plante's work, for which he has been nominated for the National Book Award, includes Difficult Women (1983), a memoir of his relationships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer and the widely praised Francoeur Trilogy—The Family (1978), The Country (1980) and The Woods (1982). His most recent book The Pure Lover (2009) is a memoir of Nikos Stangos, his partner of forty years. The papers of Nikos Stangos (1936–2004), are in The Princeton University Library, the Program in Hellenic Studies.

He has been published extensively including in The New Yorker and The Paris Review and various literary magazines.

Honours

Plante is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, elected in 2002. Among his other honours are: Henfield Fellow, University of East Anglia, 1975; British Arts Council Grant, 1977; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1983; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, 1983.

He is an ambassador for the LGBT Committee of the New York Public Library.

He has been a writer-in-residence at Maxim Gorky Literature Institute (Moscow), the Université du Québec à Montréal, Adelphi University, King's College, the University of Cambridge, the University of Tulsa, and the University of East Anglia.

Plante's book The Family was a final selection for the National Book Award in 1979.

Bibliography

  • The Ghost of Henry James (1970)
  • Slides (novel) (1971)
  • Relatives (novel) (1972)
  • The Darkness of the Body (1974)
  • Figures in Bright Air (1976)
  • The Family (1978)
  • The Country (1980)
  • The Woods (1982)
  • Difficult Women (1983)
  • The Foreigner (1984)
  • The Catholic (1986)
  • My Mother's Pearl Necklace (1987)
  • The Native (1987)
  • The Accident (1991)
  • Annunciation (1994)
  • Prayer (1998)
  • The Age of Terror (1999)
  • American Ghosts (2005)
  • ABC (2007)
  • The Pure Lover (2009)
  • Becoming a Londoner : a diary (2013)
  • Worlds Apart: a memoir (2015)
  • American Stranger (2018)
  • Eternity (novel) (2024)
  • Fantasies of the Body (novel) (2026)
  • The Death of a Greek Lover (2026)

References