Mark Helprin Biography

American novelist, born in Ossining, New York, educated at Harvard and at Oxford University; he was raised beside the Hudson River and grew up in the British West Indies. His experiences serving in the British Merchant Navy and in the Israeli Air Force find resonance in much of his fiction. Helprin has published work in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. In his epochal A Soldier of the Great War (1991), the savagery of war is projected and interpreted prismatically through a range of characters who are affected by its physical and psychic tolls. In both his novels and his stories, Helprin confronts morally complex issues, of love, war, and death, with lyricism, charm, and fierce acuity. His other works of fiction include A Dove of the East and Other Stories (1975) and Ellis Island and Other Stories (1981); and the novels The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, a Foundling (1977), Winter's Tale (1983), Swan Lake (1989), and A Memoir from the Antproff Case (1995).