An Arrow's Flight A Novel [ Advance Uncorrected Proof]

by Mark Merlis

Paperback

Published January 1, 1998

About the author

Mark Merlis is an American writer and health policy analyst. He became an independent consultant in 2001, writing papers for government agencies and for organizations such as AARP, the American Cancer Society, and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Born in Framingham, Massachusetts and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Merlis attended Wesleyan University and Brown University. He subsequently took a job with the Maryland Department of Health to support himself while writing. In 1987, he took a job with the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress as a social legislation specialist, and was involved in the creation of the Ryan White Care Act.

Beginning in the 1990s, Merlis published a series of novels. His first novel about a closeted literature professor in the McCarthy era, American Studies, won the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Literature and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction in 1995, and his second, An Arrow's Flight, a riff on the Philoctetes myth, set simultaneously in the ancient and modern worlds, won the 1999 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.

Merlis currently lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with his partner Bob, and continues to work as an independent health policy consultant.