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John Bowers is an American writer.

Bowers was born and raised in Johnson City, Tennessee, during the Great Depression and World War II era. He graduated from Science Hill High School in 1947 and from the University of Tennessee in 1952. From there he attended the Handy Writers Colony in Marshall, Illinois, founded by Lowney Turner Handy and her husband, Harry Handy, along with her student, the best-selling novelist James Jones. An autobiographical and perhaps slightly fictionalized account of this adventure is Bowers’s first major novel, The Colony, published in 1971.

During the 1960s, Bowers published numerous interviews and articles in major magazines, including The New York Times, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, New York, Cosmopolitan, and Harper's, some of which were collected in paperback under the title The Golden Bowers in the early 1970s. His second novel, No More Reunions (1973), about his teen years in Johnson City, was optioned for film but the movie was never made. A third novel of that period, Helene (1976), is a Lolita-like tale set in 1950s America with college-age males and a young teenage girl.

In the Land of Nyx: Night and Its Inhabitants (1984), Bowers's next novel, was a study of the subculture of people who live their lives at night rather than during the daylight. Probably inspired by his father, who was night manager at the local railroad station during John’s childhood, this book is difficult to classify in any standard genre, and languished somewhat after its release because bookstores and libraries did not know quite what to do with it.

Turning his attention to historical examination of the Civil War, Bowers wrote Stonewall Jackson: Portrait of a Soldier (1990) and Chickamauga and Chattanooga: The Battles That Doomed the Confederacy (2000), which mix fact, fiction, and anecdotes.

For over two decades he has been an Associate Professor in the Writing Program at Columbia University. His play Remembrance of Things Present has been produced twice Off-Broadway.

All of Bowers’s work is somewhat autobiographical, and at least partially fictionalized. In Stonewall Jackson, for example, the hard facts of Jackson’s life may be in shorter supply than in biographies, but Bowers worked hard to “get inside his head” and create a deeply personal and moving narrative that leaves this reader feeling more satisfied with knowing the real character of Jackson than would be the case with a more conventional biography.

Bowers’s ability to personalize his subject matter, and his frequent digressions into his own experience, are the hallmarks of his style and possibly his most endearing quality to his fans. On the other hand, his detractors might describe this tactic as sloppy or self-indulgent and fault him for it.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "John Bowers", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0