R. Clifton Spargo is a novelist, short story writer, and music and cultural critic.

 

His novel Beautiful Fools (Overlook Press 2013) imagines the missing final chapter in the tragic romance of one of America’s great literary couples, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. Taking place mostly in Cuba in the spring of 1939, the novel is a love and loss story that is at once personal and political. Beautiful Fools received glowing reviews from The Washington Post, Boston Globe, The New Yorker, and was described as “historical fiction at its best” by the Times Literary Supplement and a “work of genuine literary talent” by the Spectator. Spargo’s short stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, North American Review, FICTION, Glimmer Train Stories, SOMA, and Kenyon Review. He is a past winner of Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers and its Fiction Open Contest. His stories have been interpreted and performed by Chicago Public Radio’s Stories on Stage and the Watershed Theater in Des Moines.

 

Spargo’s writings on literature, contemporary culture, and rock and other popular music have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun, The Yale Review, Commonweal, Raritan, PMLA, Bookslut, and The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. He was the author of “The HI/LO,” a Huffington Post column that explored interplay between high and low culture, and he now regularly reviews music for Newcity, the Chicago-based monthly and online arts and culture magazine.

 

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Spargo holds master’s degrees from Edinburgh University and Yale Divinity School, and a doctorate in literature from Yale University. He has been a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities, twice a fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Provost's Fellow in Fiction at the University of Iowa, the visiting Dixon Professor in Creative Writing at Wittenberg University, and a Professor of English at Marquette University.

 

An expert on testimony, ethics, and the Holocaust, Spargo has published two books of literature and philosophy with the Johns Hopkins University Press, The Ethics of Mourning and Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death, and an edited collection (with Robert M. Ehrenreich), After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture, with Rutgers University Press.

 

A longtime advocate for the homeless, Spargo chaired the board of directors of Columbus House Homeless Shelter. His commitment to eradicating gender-based violence led him to create and co-found an award-winning, global testimonial writing program at The Voices and Faces Project; and in 2025, he co-founded Center for Story & Witness, which builds on and expands The Voices and Faces Project model.

 

Spargo splits his time between Chicago, where Center for Story & Witness is based, and New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches creative writing at Yale University.