Richard Bruce Snodgrass is an American writer and photographer known for his evocations of life in small-town and rural western Pennsylvania. His published work includes fiction, nonfiction, and photography. Early life and education Richard Bruce Snodgrass was born on April 22, 1940, in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, to Bruce DeWitt Snodgrass and Helen (née Murchie) Snodgrass. His parents were both United Presbyterians of Scottish descent, and both graduated from Tarkio College, in northwestern Missouri. His father was a founding partner of a prominent accounting firm in Pittsburgh, and his mother was trained as a teacher. Snodgrass’s older brother, W. D. Snodgrass was a poet. In addition to his brother, Snodgrass had two older siblings—sisters Shirley (1937–2016) and Barbara (1928–1955). Barbara’s death, at the age of twenty-seven, from a coronary thrombosis aggravated by a chronic asthma-like condition is the subject of a series of poems by W. D. Snodgrass. The family lived in the College Hill neighborhood of Beaver Falls. The orange-brick house with distinctive rounded corners and curved windows is the subject of a collection of photographs Snodgrass took in the 1970s. In 1959, Snodgrass enrolled in Saint Vincent College, then transferred to the University of Detroit and audited classes at Wayne State University. He then enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in English literature. He graduated with a BA in 1963. Snodgrass subsequently studied with and assisted the renowned photographer Oliver Gagliani at his workshops in Virginia City, Nevada. He received his MFA in photography from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1973. Career Writing Snodgrass’s first novel, There’s Something in the Back Yard, was published by Viking in 1989. The book earned critical praise from the Washington Post Book World, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. His short fiction has been published in the New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly, California Quarterly, Pittsburgh Quarterly, and elsewhere. His essay on Ross Macdonald appeared in South Dakota Review. As a fiction writer, he was artist in residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, in Taos, New Mexico. He also received a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2011, Carnegie Mellon University Press published An Uncommon Field: The Flight 93 Temporary Memorial, a collection of photographs and meditations about the now-dismantled structure on the site that later became a national park in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Skyhorse Publishing brought out