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John Robert Lennon (born 1970) is an American novelist, short story writer, musician and composer.

Lennon was raised in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania (1992) and an M.F.A. (1995) from the University of Montana. He is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing Program at Cornell University and resides in Upstate New York.

Lennon's first novel, The Light of Falling Stars (1997), about the aftermath of a plane crash, was the winner of Barnes & Noble's 1997 Discover Great New Writers Award. His fourth novel, Mailman, was released to critical success in 2003 and concerns a mail-carrying protagonist named Albert Lippincott who is clearly losing his mind. The book won praise for its humorous portrayal of the sadness of everyday life.

His other books include The Funnies (1999), a comedy about a would-be cartoonist; On the Night Plain (2001), a noir western set in the 1940s; and Pieces for the Left Hand: 100 Anecdotes (2005), a collection of 100 very short stories. His novel Happyland is roughly based around the American Girl doll company creator Pleasant Rowland. It was dropped by publisher W. W. Norton due to fear of libel and subsequently published in serial by Harper's Magazine. In 2009, Graywolf Press published a new novel, Castle, and reissued Pieces For The Left Hand, which was appearing for the first time in the U.S.

Lennon is also a musician and composer. As a solo artist, recording as Inverse Room, he has released three full-length CDs, Simulacrum (2002), Pieces for the Left Hand (2005) (a companion to the book of the same title), and American Recluse (2007). He is also one half, along with musician Jim Spitznagel, of The Bemus Point, which has released one CD, Infra Dig (2005). In the early 1990s he fronted the band Wicked Bison, playing the Philadelphia bar and fraternity scene.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "J. Robert Lennon", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0