Paul Collins is an American author who specializes in writing subjects of history, memoirs, and antiquarian (antique) literature. Overall, Collins has nine novels completed and published, including The Murder of the Century, with hundreds of articles for various magazines and newspapers published as well. In 2009, Collins was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in the nonfiction category. The Guggenheim Fellowship is very selective in choosing who is let in, sorting through hundreds of applicants and selecting only 200 every year.
Collins is also the founding editor of the Collins Library, a small publishing company under McSweeney’s Books. The Collins Library works with unusual titles in order to reprint, republish, and revive. The titles are usually obscure, historical works, but Collins sees the value in these works and republishes them anyway. Some of these works include a World War I memoir of an internment camp and a 1934 detective tale.
The 1990s was when Collins really got his start, although it was small. Collins’ earliest experience of reporting was as a concert reviewer for Daily Aggie, where he did a review on the B.B. King Show. It was not until 2000 that Collins became a magazine writer. Writing for the business magazine eCompany Now was not his first choice, but he soon grew to like it and has since written over 100 news articles, essays, and features for magazines and newspapers all over.
Not only is Collins a reporter, he also has played his hand as a nonfiction author. The first nonfiction book he wrote started as an essay about the research of a Victorian astronomer. Collins and his wife were traveling around Britain on a train when he began to write. Collins had another work that was sent to publishers, but was waiting to hear back from. Seeing no hope for that, he decided to write something new, and with a broken laptop, he wrote the entire work long hand in composition books. The result was Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World.
More recently he has done some freelance work for New Yorker, Lapham’s Quarterly, and New Scientist. Currently, Paul Collins lives in Portland, Oregon where he is Professor and Chair of English at Portland State University.