Louis Begley

Louis Begley grew up in ‘the world of yesterday’, in an intellectual and educated Jewish family which managed to survive the Nazi occupation and went from Paris to America to begin a new life. Begley studied law at Harvard and began working at a New York law firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, where he later became a partner. In 1991, he published his first novel, Wartime Lies, which meant his breakthrough as a writer and which was awarded the PEN Award and the Prix Médicis étranger. Among his later works are novels such as About Schmidt (1996) and nonfiction works such as The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay (2008) and Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (2009).