With his scintillating debut at the age of 23 with Family Dancing, tagged as a minimalist author and as a minstrel of angst, through the years has given us novels with a complex and comprehensive range demonstrating that he is one of today's major and most valued writers.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Leavitt is a graduate of Yale University and a professor at the University of Florida. He has also taught at Princeton.
He is the author of  A Place I’ve Never Been, Arkansas, The Marble Quilt, as well as the novels The Lost Language of Cranes, Equal Affections, While England Sleeps (Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize), The Page Turner, Martin Bauman, or A Sure Thing, and The Body of Jonah Boyd. His most recent novel  is The Indian Clerk, finalist for the PEN/Faulkner prize, appeared in 2007.
His work has appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, Esquire, Vogue, The Paris Review, DoubleTake, The Southwest Review, Tin House, Food & Wine and Travel and Leisure. He divides his time between Florida and Tuscany, Italy. His books are published in Italy by Mondadori.