Charles Robert Newman

Charles Newman (May 27, 1938 – March 15, 2006) was an American writer, editor, and critic born in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied American studies at Yale, later earned a master's degree at Northwestern, and became widely known for helping turn TriQuarterly into an important literary magazine.

As a novelist, Newman wrote several works of fiction, with White Jazz becoming his best-known novel. He was also widely discussed for The Post-Modern Aura (1985), a combative work of criticism about fiction and American culture. Alongside his writing, he taught English and received major honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for Innovative Writing.

Newman spent much of his later career working on an ambitious multi-volume fiction project that remained unfinished at his death in 2006. Even so, he is still remembered as an adventurous literary figure: part novelist, part critic, part editor, and very much his own kind of writer.