Geryon, the protagonist of The Autobiography of a Red Man, shares the name of a mythological red-winged monster. He lives with a ruthless older brother and a gentle but unprotective mother, and begins writing his autobiography at the age of five. As an adult, he finds solace in the viewfinder of a camera and the embrace of a young man named Hercules, who abruptly and inexplicably ends their relationship. Geryon embarks on a journey, "leaving his life behind like a failed season," and increasingly retreats into a parallel world created by his camera, until a chance encounter with Hercules changes everything again. The Autobiography of a Red Man is a novel in verse, a loose interpretation of ancient Greek myth and a modern coming-of-age story, but also a paradoxical statement about authorship, translation, and the conventions of genre, where Geryon's story is framed by the words, real and fictional, of the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein. Anne Carson (born 1950) is a Canadian poet, essayist, professor of classical studies, and translator of Sappho and Euripides. She defended her dissertation on Sappho and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Genius Grant.