Oprah's Book Club

David Wroblewski's Biography

David Wroblewski was born in 1959 in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. When he was 3 years old, his parents bought a small and somewhat ramshackle farm in rural central Wisconsin, determined to try their luck at dairy farming. Within two years, they'd sold their livestock and shut down the farm, and David's father had taken a job at a nearby machine shop to pay the bills. With an unused barn at her disposal, his mother began to raise dogs. David spent a good part of his childhood doing odd jobs around the kennel and honing his puppy-wrangling skills. In time, that barn and that land, transported 100 miles to the north, would become the setting for The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

In high school, David won a statewide arts competition with a short story about a pack of wolves. At the University of Wisconsin, he declared himself a theater major, imagining he would someday make a living as an actor; small stage roles in Equus and West Side Story convinced him otherwise. By the time he graduated, he had become fascinated with the practical and collaborative art of making software and took a degree in computer science. He has since developed software ranging from embedded controls in ring laser gyros to artificial intelligence programs that analyze the meaning of English sentences to websites that teach kids how to write essays. He is an active black-and-white landscape photographer and holds a creative writing degree from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Over the years, David has lived in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Minneapolis and Austin, Texas. He currently makes his home in Colorado with writer Kimberly McClintock, their dog, Lola, and their cat, Mitsou.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is his first novel.