Katherine Howe

Katherine Howe is an American novelist known for her historical fiction that explores belief, power, and the shifting nature of reality. Her debut novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009), became a New York Times Bestseller and established her reputation as a writer interested in the intersections between faith, intellect, and the supernatural.

Howe is also the author of A True Account (2023), inspired by her own family history, and has co-written two historical non-fiction books with Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt (2021) and Astor (2023).

Katherine Howe was born and raised in Houston, Texas. Her mother worked as a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. After graduating from the Kinkaid School, she studied art history and philosophy at Columbia University.

She began writing fiction while pursuing postgraduate studies and completed an MA in American and New England Studies at Boston University. She has taught at Cornell University and held a research fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 2016.

Her first novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, drew on her own ancestry: she is related to Elizabeth Proctor and Elizabeth Howe, both convicted during the Salem witch trials. Howe later discovered a third relative, Deliverance Dane, the inspiration for her first book. “I found out by sort of an unbelievable fluke,” she said in an interview. “Everyone’s interested in witches! And of course my teenage self thought the whole thing was badass when I found out.”

Following the success of her debut, she published The House of Velvet and Glass (2012), Conversion (2014), and The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen (2015). In 2019, she released The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, a continuation of the themes in her first novel. Her fiction has been translated into more than twenty languages and often examines the persistence of belief systems in modern life.

In 2023, Howe published A True Account, a novel based on the life of her ancestor Hannah Masury, a 19th-century woman who disguised herself as a cabin boy to sail on a pirate ship. The book explores themes of disguise, gender, and self-invention against the backdrop of maritime life.

Outside fiction, Howe edited The Penguin Book of Witches (2014) and co-authored two family histories with Anderson Cooper, tracing the rise and fall of American dynasties.

Katherine Howe continues to divide her time between New England and New York City.