David Plante born 4 March 1940.Author, David Plante was born in Providence, Rhode Island, but has lived much of his life in London.
Since the publication of his first novel, The Ghost of Henry James in 1970, Plante has proved to be one of the most prolific and experimental of contemporary writers, with eleven other novels, as well as many reviews, essays, and a nonfiction book, Difficult Women (1983), to his credit.
Plante is most noted for The Family (1978), The Country (1981), and The Woods (1982), his highly acclaimed Francoeur 'trilogy'. (The Foreigner and The Catholic have rather specific links to the trilogy but are set 'away' from the family of the novels.) While these novels vary in their presentation of overtly gay characters or sex scenes, they do suggest other coming-of-age works by gay writers such as Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Truman Capote. However, Plante's novels lack the gothic extravagances often associated with those other writers.
Plante's low-key approach allows the other family members and characters to emerge as clearly as his narrator, Daniel, who seems sexually ambiguous in the trilogy. Such ambiguity as found in life is a hallmark of Plante's writing, sexuality included.
Plante's approach to homosexuality ranges from the explicit and emotionally violent, as in The Catholic, to the quietly transcending, as in his earlier novels. In the novels of the trilogy, as well as The Foreigner and The Accident (1991), Plante's leading male characters suggest sexualities unacknowledged.
His most recent book is a memoir of Nikos Stangos, his partner of forty years, The Pure Lover (2009). The papers of his former partner, Nikos Stangos (1936-2004), are in The Princeton University Library, the Program in Hellenic Studies. Plante lives in London, Lucca Italy, and Athens Greece. He has dual citizenship, American and British.
Plante focuses not only on the varieties of love and sexuality but on the different expressions love and sexuality may take. He refuses clearly to be locked in as a writer, and this refusal makes his gay characters, and his work generally, complex, as does his often experimental style. Plante's conviction that he himself has many identities and different sexualities shows in his writing.