Biography
Mark Helprin was born on June 28, 1947, in New York City. His father, Morris Helprin, worked in the film industry, eventually becoming president of London Films. Eleanor Lynn Helprin, Mark’s mother, was a successful actress, starring in several Broadway productions in the 1930’s and 1940’s. When Mark was six, the family left New York City for the prosperous Hudson River Valley suburb of Ossining, New York.
Helprin attended Harvard University, earning his English degree in 1969. After that he attended Stanford University briefly, moved to Israel for a few months, and then returned to Harvard, where he completed a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies in 1972. During an additional nine months in Israel, he became a dual citizen and was drafted into the Israeli army. Though he did not see any combat duty, it was an experience he would use in many of his stories and novels. Upon leaving Israel, he attended Princeton University and the University of Oxford for short periods.
Helprin first realized that he had a talent for writing when he was seventeen. He wrote a description of the Hagia Sophia, the cathedral in Istanbul that he had never seen, and was so proud of the result that he decided that writing was something he could do, and do well. He went on to write numerous short stories which he submitted to Harper’s and The New Yorker. After a dozen rejections, The New Yorker accepted two at once: “Because of the Waters of the Flood” and “Leaving the Church.”
Those two stories, and eighteen others, were published in 1975 in the collection A Dove of the East, and Other Stories. This volume, with its wide range of characters, settings, and themes, received generally good reviews. Writer John Gardner was impressed with Helprin’s handling of various cultures and wrote that Helprin “seemed to be born and raised everywhere.”
Helprin’s novel Refiner’s Fire: The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, a Foundling came out in 1977, to mixed reviews. This was a rambling, picaresque novel of improbable events skillfully rendered. Detractors faulted the book for having too much in it; one reviewer complained that it had “enough matter in it for three or four novels, but far too much for one.” Most, though, could not help but admire Helprin’s lyrical style and imaginative use of language.
In 1981, another volume of Helprin’s short stories appeared, many of them again reprinted from The New Yorker. Ellis Island, and Other Stories cemented Helprin’s stature as a major writer. This collection, like A Dove of the East, contains powerful stories of a wide range of characters, from cowboys in twentieth century Israel to a captain of a sailing ship in the 1850’s to a would-be mountain climber in Germany. The title story, “Ellis Island,” about an immigrant to New York at the turn of the twentieth century, has the episodic nature of Refiner’s Fire and also introduces some of the fantastic elements Helprin further developed in his next work.
Though Helprin considered himself “prize-proof” because of his refusal to join writers’ groups and endorse other books, the publication of Ellis Island brought him many accolades. Helprin received the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Jewish Book Award. Ellis Island was nominated for the American Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.
Winter’s Tale (1983) became a best seller, even reaching the paperback racks at grocery-store checkout counters. This novel, set in a fantastic version of New York City, spans the century from 1900 to the year 2000,...
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touching on the themes of death, rebirth, love, and justice. Helprin’s next two projects,Swan Lake (1989), a collaboration with noted children’s illustrator Chris Van Allsburg, and the novel A Soldier of the Great War (1991), also quickly hit the best-seller lists.
Helprin’s next major work was Memoir from Antproof Case (1995), a sometimes humorous chronicle of the twentieth century through the memory of an old man hiding from assassins in Brazil. He followed this with two more collaborations for young adults with Van Allsburg and then in 2004 published another collection, The Pacific, and Other Stories. Another comic novel, Freddy and Fredericka, followed in 2005.
Helprin has been making a name for himself as a conservative political commentator, with articles published in The National Review and The Nation and by the Claremont Institute, where he is a senior fellow. He is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He also served as a speechwriter and foreign policy adviser for Senator Bob Dole during Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign.
Helprin married Lisa Kennedy in 1980, and they raised two daughters together. The Helprins settled on a fifty-six-acre farm not far from Charlottesville, Virginia. The writer who said that he enjoyed writing more than anything certainly has enjoyed a measure of critical and financial success rare among serious writers.