Trying to Fool Death

Marvin Cohen (born July 6, 1931), is the author of a number of episodic novels, plays and verse, a book on baseball, and several collections of shorter pieces-stories, dialogues, parables, and idiosyncratic essays. His work has also appeared in more than 100 publications, from the experimental to the mainstream, including: Ambit, Antaeus, Assembling ("a collection of otherwise unpublishable writings"), The Beat Scene (alongside Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Corso), Chelsea, Fiction, The Hudson Review, Thomas Merton's Monks Pond, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, The Transatlantic Review, The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York City. He has described himself as one who has "risen from lower-class background to lower-class foreground." He studied art at Cooper Union but left college to focus on writing. He supported himself with a series of short-term jobs including mink farmer and merchant seaman. He later taught creative writing at various New York colleges. He is married and currently lives with his wife in Manhattan.