Dale Peck (born 1967 on Long Island, New York) is an American novelist.
Peck was raised in Kansas, and attended Drew University in New Jersey. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995. He currently teaches creative writing at The New School in New York City.
Peck is best known as a controversial and caustic literary critic, who famously described Rick Moody as "the worst writer of his generation." His own novels have received mixed reviews; Salon.com described Now It's Time to Say Goodbye as a "hyperpotboiler" with a plot "both sensational and preposterous" [1] The New York Review of Books called Martin and John "surprisingly sophisticated", but said Now It's Time to Say Goodbye "collapsed under the weight of its overladen allegorical structures" and diagnosed Peck's fiction as a "seesaw between a strained "lyricism" ... and cliché" [2].
Peck currently writes for The New Republic and other publications. His negative criticism and the general tone of The New Republic was attacked by the editors of n+1 magazine. They said:
"With the emergence of the ridiculous Dale Peck, the method of Wieseltier's literary salon reached its reductio ad absurdum. Peck smeared the walls with shit, and bankrupted their authority for all time to come. So many forms of extremism turn into their opposite at the terminal stage. Thus The New Republic's supposed brief for dry, austere, high-literary value—manifesting itself for years in a baffled rage against everything new or confusing—led to Peck's auto-therapeutic wetness (as self-pity is the refuge of bullies) and hatred of classic modernism (which, to philistines, will always be new and confusing)." [3]