Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn, an award-winning author, journalist, and critic, was born on Long Island in 1960 and received his B. A. summa cum laude in Classics from the University of Virginia and his M. A. and Ph. D. in Classics from Princeton University, where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. After completing his Ph.D. in 1994, he began a career in journalism in New York City, and since then his articles, essays, reviews and translations have appeared frequently in numerous national publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Esquire, and The Paris Review. From 2000 until 2002, he was the weekly book critic for New York magazine, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism in 2001. Since 2000, he has been a frequent contributor of book, film, and theater reviews to The New York Review of Books; for the latter, he was awarded the 2002 George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism. His book reviews and essays on literary topics appear as well in The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, and he is also a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. His work has been widely anthologized in collections including "The Best American Travel Writing," "The Mrs. Dalloway Reader," "Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca," and—for “Republicans Can Be Cured!”, his satirical New York Times Op-Ed piece about the discovery of a gene for political conservatism— "Best American Humor." In addition to his other awards, Mr. Mendelsohn is the recipient of a 2005 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Daniel Mendelsohn’s 1999 memoir of sexual identity and family history, "The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity" (Knopf, 1999; Vintage, 2000) was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. His scholarly study of Greek tragedy, "Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays," was published in October 2002 by Oxford University Press, and appeared in February, 2005 in paperback. His current book projects include a short life of Archimedes and a new translation of the complete works of the modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy. In September, 2006, Mr. Mendelsohn's new book, "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," the story of his search to learn about the fates of family members who perished in the Holocaust, was published by HarperCollins to extraordinary critical acclaim in publications from People (four stars, critic's choice) to O, the Oprah Magazine ("stunning...beautiful and powerfully moving") to the Los Angeles Times ("magnificent and deeply wise"). Front-cover reviews were featured in the Chicago Tribune ("a work of major significance and pummeling impact") and in the New York Times Book Review, which declared THE LOST "a powerful work of investigative empathy" that "draws us more deeply into the experience of [the Holocaust] than we might have thought possible," "a new way of telling a story we thought we knew." From 1994 to 2002, Mr. Mendelsohn was a Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Princeton University; he is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College. He divides his time among homes in New York City, New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley.

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