Michael Martone

In a 2007 interview with Fred Arroyo (now collected in Unconventions), Martone provides a list of major influences, cataloguing figures not only from literary fiction but also popular musicians, visual artists, and television personalities, explaining that, to him it seems "the assumptions about influences often suggest the notion of a Gatsby-like program of improvement. The writer only reads 'good' books that contribute to his or her scheme of perfection ... Whatever I am up to as a writer has come about mainly by accident, inertia, and least resistance." Throughout other interviews, Martone reiterates a number of the same names and also mentions several others, occasionally expanding on why these writers are important for him. What follows is a partial list gleaned from these interviews.

Martone's 2005 work, Michael Martone, is an investigation of form and autobiography. It was originally written as a series of contributor's notes for various publications. One of his central interests is the "false biography" and the often blurry boundary between fact and fiction. He also considers himself a "neo-regionalist."

The permeable boundary between fact and fiction is reflected in books like his 2001 The Blue Guide to Indiana which, as a disclaimer on the cover makes clear, "is in no way affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with the series of travel books titled Blue Guide," and "in no way factually depicts or accurately represents the State of Indiana." The disclaimer, Martone explains, was included after he received a cease and desist letter from the publisher of "the real Blue Guide." This letter in turn inspired the opening chapter of Martone's 2015 anthology, Winesburg, Indiana, written in the form of a cease and desist letter from the fictional town of Winesburg—created by the novelist Sherwood Anderson—which claims proprietary rights to “the distribution of Sadness, Fear, Longing, and Confusion itself. We have patented madness. We own Trembling. We extensively market Grief.“ Martone further obscured the line between fact and fiction in his 2020 book, The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, which was called "an ingenious reimagining of the real-life inventor of skywriting" by the New York Times.

Aside from studying under and befriending John Barth, Martone also developed a close relationship with the writer Thomas Pynchon while the two lived together in Brooklyn. It was later on, while teaching at Syracuse in the early 1990s, that Martone befriended a young David Foster Wallace and introduced to him a number of influential works, most notably Lewis Hyde's The Gift.

Martone has devoted much of his career to disrupting and defamiliarizing the taken-as-given notions of order, ownership, and identity in his field, and has been described as literature's "most notorious mutineer." In 1988 his membership to the American Academy of Poets was briefly revoked after he published two books, one listed as "prose" and one as "poetry" which were—aside from the line-breaks in one—completely identical to one another. His AWP membership has been revoked multiple times. In the late nineties, after reading Neal Bowers' book of non-fiction, Words for the Taking, which describes the author's agonizing hunt for the person who has plagiarized his poems, Martone began to publish poetry under the pseudonym "Neal Bowers." "I am not using Bowers' poems," Martone later explained, "only the name. So when these poems get published, Neal Bowers could actually include them on his vita as far as I'm concerned. I hope he does ... I understand the theft of intellectual property that got Neal Bowers so worked up. But is it plagiarism to actually contribute to someone else's work? I am not stealing his work but actually donating my own to his store of work."

Michael Martone (born August 22, 1955 in Fort Wayne, Indiana) is the author of nearly 30 books and chapbooks. He was a professor at the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, where he taught from 1996 until his retirement in 2020.