Despite once being called the “the funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic” by Kingsley Amis, and the numerous comparisons to Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse, De Vries’s novels (numbering 26 published over a forty plus year career) have been mostly out of print after his last novel, Peckham’s Marbels, was published in 1986. De Vries died in 1993.
Peter De Vries began his writing career as a poet and short-story writer in Chicago in the late 1930s. His first novel (which, along with the next two efforts, he later disowns) But Who Wakes the Bugler? was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. De Vries served in various capacities as an editor for Poetry Magazine for six years until, in 1944, after connecting with fellow Midwesterner James Thurber, De Vries leaves Chicago for New York City and part-time work at the New Yorker. In publishing the novel The Tunnel of Love (which eventually becomes both a Broadway hit as well as a film) in 1954, De Vries begins his career in earnest.

Open Road Integrated Media is helping to bring back into "print" several of De Vries's novels including The Mackerel Plaza, one of De Vries's most important early novels.

De Vries is a writer who clearly understands the relationship between faith and doubt, belief and unbelief, and is working out this relationship in the lives of his characters. De Vries, raised in a Dutch immigrant community of devout Christian Reformed (Calvinists), never strays far from discussions of belief. While no longer claiming the faith in which he was raised, and despite the fact that De Vries certainly targets the easy faith of the comfortable, he is also relentless in his assault on the nihilistic faith of the secularists. As Ralph Wood commented in a piece published after De Vries’s death in 1993: [De Vries was] “a doubt-filled skeptic, a backsliding unbeliever… [whose work] rollicks with hilarity, not because he was cackling his way through the cemetery but because he was declaring in his bemused solidarity with the rest of us—caught as we all are, in the web of suffering and depravity.” It’s yet to be seen if De Vries will find a new audience in the 21st century, but De Vries deserves to be remembered.