Louis Begley was born in Poland in 1933. He was able to escape the Holocaust and after the Second World War moved to the United States with his family. He was naturalised in 1953 and studied English literature at Harvard University. After military service in Göppingen he returned to Harvard and graduated in law. Until the 1990s he was associated with the major New York law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, first as a staff attorney, later as a senior partner.
Louis Begley’s first novel Wartime Lies, the story of a Jewish boy who escapes the Holocaust, was published in 1990. It received several awards and quickly became a bestseller. Other novels followed, including About Schmidt, the basis for the eponymous Hollywood film starring Jack Nicholson. From 1993 to 1995 Louis Begley was president of the American P.E.N. Centre. The Suhrkamp-Verlag, publisher of the German translation of his latest book on the Dreyfus affair, has this to say about the work: “Louis Begley shows how, then as today, anti-Semitism and racism function in an outwardly liberal society. Charges are based on prejudice, racial profiling replaces the quest for truth, evidence is trumped up. Guantánamo is closer to Devil’s Island than we might care to think.”