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Mark Merlis (March 9, 1950 – August 15, 2017) was an American writer and health policy analyst.

Biography

Born in Framingham, Massachusetts on March 9, 1950 and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Merlis attended Wesleyan University and Brown University. He subsequently took a job with the Maryland Department of Health to support himself while writing. In 1987, he took a job with the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress as a social legislation specialist, and was involved in the creation of the Ryan White Care Act.

Beginning in the 1990s, Merlis published a series of novels. His first novel, American Studies, was published in 1994 and won the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Literature and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction in 1995, and his second, An Arrow's Flight, was published in 1998 and won the 1999 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. He published two further novels during his lifetime, Man About Town in 2003 and JD in 2015.

Merlis lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and worked both as an author and an independent health policy consultant.

Illness and death

Merlis died on August 15, 2017, at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, from pneumonia associated with ALS. He was sixty-seven years old. He is survived by his husband of many years, Robert Ashe.

Works

• American Studies (1994)
• An Arrow's Flight (1998) - also published as Pyrrhus (1999)
• Man About Town (2003)
• JD (2015)

References

1. ^ "Mark Merlis, novelist who explored gay life in 20th-century America, dies at 67". The Washington Post, August 23, 2017.
2. ^ Mark Merlis Archived 2012-10-15 at the Wayback Machine at glbtq.com.
3. ^ William Johnson, "In Remembrance: Mark Merlis". Lambda Literary Foundation, August 22, 2017. Accessed 23 August 23, 2017.
4. Nishant Shahani, "The Politics of Queer Time: Retro-Sexual Returns to the Primal Scene of American Studies". Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 54 Issue 4 (Winter 2008). p791-814.
5. "Merlis, Mark. An Arrow's Flight". Library Journal, August 1998. pp. 132-133.
6. "Mark Merlis' new novel hits closer to home". Philadelphia Gay News, July 4, 2003.
7. "A Married Man in the ’60s". The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, May 1, 2015.
8. Sacks, Sam (April 24, 2015). "Still Acting Up". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660.

External links

• Mark Merlis

• 1950 births
• 2017 deaths
• 20th-century American novelists
• 21st-century American novelists
• American male novelists
• American gay writers
• Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction winners
• People from Framingham, Massachusetts
• Writers from Baltimore
• Novelists from Massachusetts
• American LGBTQ novelists
• 20th-century American male writers
• 21st-century American male writers
• Novelists from Maryland
• LGBTQ people from Massachusetts