Eleanor Henderson

Eleanor Henderson's debut novel, Ten Thousand Saints (Ecco), immediately landed on best-seller and required reading lists. Her other fiction has appeared in Agni, North American Review, Ninth Letter, and Columbia, among other publications, and her story "The Farms" was nominated for a Pushcart and selected by Alice Sebold for The Best American Short Stories 2009. Her nonfiction has appeared in Poets & Writers, where she was a contributing editor, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, where she was the chair of the fiction board. The unique story and critical acclaim of Ten Thousand Saints, coupled with Henderson's enthusiasm and passion for writing, makes her the perfect speaker for university and colleges, First Year Experience programs, libraries, writing conferences, and workshops.

In Ten Thousand Saints, Henderson tells the part coming-of-age, part coming-to-terms story of Jude Keffy-Horn, who, after being adopted by a pair of diehard hippies, spends much of his youth developing innovative methods to get high with his friend, Teddy. When Teddy dies of an overdose, Jude's relationship with drugs and his parents find a new extreme. Jude attempts to honor Teddy's memory through his new, militantly clean lifestyle, but his addiction to straight edge has its own dangerous consequences. Meanwhile, their parents struggle to raise a generation that has a radical reinterpretation of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll and a grown-up awareness of nature and nurture, brotherhood and loss. Moving back and forth between Vermont and New York City, Henderson's first novel is an emphatically observed story of a frayed tangle of family members, brought painfully together by a death, then carried along in anticipation of new and unexpected life. With empathy and masterful skill, Henderson conjures a rich portrait of the modern age and the struggles that unite and divide generations.

Henderson was born in Greece, grew up in Florida, and attended Middlebury College and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA in 2005. From 2006 to 2010, Henderson taught at James Madison University in Virginia. She is currently an assistant professor at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, where she lives with her husband and son.

Ten Thousand Saints and a Career in Writing