Author. A surgeon, he drew on his experiences in medicine to create a number of well-received stories. Born Allen Richard Selzer, he was the child of a physician father and opera singer mother, graduated from Schenectady's Union College in 1948, earned his M.D. from Albany Medical College in 1953, served with the US Army in Korea for two years, and finished his surgery residency at Yale in 1958. Dr. Selzer established a successful practice but always wanted to be a writer, publishing works with a medical theme including the 1974 "Rituals of Surgery" and 1979's "Confessions of a Knife", while penning numerous horror stories for "The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine", his work always marked by his Baroque style. In 1985, he retired to devote himself full-time to literature, producing a dozen volumes of short stories, among them the 1990 "Imagine a Woman", "The Doctor Stories" (1998) and 2001's "The Exact Location of the Soul". His tales often dealt with ethical difficulties, and some received particular note, among them the 1991 "New York Times" piece "A Question of Mercy", which tells of an AIDS patient's desire to commit suicide, "Imelda" in which a plastic surgeon loses a four year old girl but then repairs her cleft lip anyway so that she will look better in her casket, and "Wither Thou Goest", the tale of a doctor asking the wife of a brain-dead man for permission to harvest organs for transplantation. Dr. Selzer was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was nominated for the Faulkner Award for Fiction; at his demise, a number of his works remained in print.
Author. A surgeon, he drew on his experiences in medicine to create a number of well-received stories. Born Allen Richard Selzer, he was the child of a physician father and opera singer mother, graduated from Schenectady's Union College in 1948, earned his M.D. from Albany Medical College in 1953, served with the US Army in Korea for two years, and finished his surgery residency at Yale in 1958. Dr. Selzer established a successful practice but always wanted to be a writer, publishing works with a medical theme including the 1974 "Rituals of Surgery" and 1979's "Confessions of a Knife", while penning numerous horror stories for "The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine", his work always marked by his Baroque style. In 1985, he retired to devote himself full-time to literature, producing a dozen volumes of short stories, among them the 1990 "Imagine a Woman", "The Doctor Stories" (1998) and 2001's "The Exact Location of the Soul". His tales often dealt with ethical difficulties, and some received particular note, among them the 1991 "New York Times" piece "A Question of Mercy", which tells of an AIDS patient's desire to commit suicide, "Imelda" in which a plastic surgeon loses a four year old girl but then repairs her cleft lip anyway so that she will look better in her casket, and "Wither Thou Goest", the tale of a doctor asking the wife of a brain-dead man for permission to harvest organs for transplantation. Dr. Selzer was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was nominated for the Faulkner Award for Fiction; at his demise, a number of his works remained in print.
Bio by: Bob Hufford
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