Leslie Epstein

Residence : Brookline, MA

Biographical information

Leslie Epstein was born in Los Angeles to a family of film makers. His father and uncle together wrote dozens of films in the late thirties and forties and on, including The Man who Came to Dinner, Arsenic and Old Lace, Strawberry Blonde, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Casablanca. Not surprisingly, films have made up a good part of the subject matter of his fiction.

Epstein left California for an undergraduate degree at Yale and a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. He has published nine books of fiction (P.D. Kimerakov, The Steinway Quintet Plus Four, King of the Jews, Regina, Goldkorn Tales, Pinto and Sons, Pandaemonium, Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail, and, most recently, San Remo Drive), of which the best-known, King of the Jews, has become a classic of Holocaust Fiction and has been published in eleven foreign languages.

His articles and stories have appeared in such places as Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Playboy, the Yale Review, TriQuarterly, Tikkun, Partisan Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. His article, "Pictures at an Extermination: a Child of Hollywood Discovers Auschwitz and Himself," appeared in the September 2000 issue of Harper's. In addition to the Rhodes Scholarship, he has received many fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright and a Guggenheim fellowship, an award for Distinction in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a residency at the Rockefeller Institute at Bellagio, and grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University for more than twenty years.

Discussion topics

• A Hollywood Childhood (or Blue Skies, as I've called it)
  Describes how my secular childhood was inevitable given my family's position in creating the American dream, and how that early emptiness led to my return not only to a kind of Jewishness, but to California, the film industry, and my family and earliest memories in my work.
• Memory and Imagination and the Creative Act
  How the creative act draws on the earliest memories and experiences and how they are transformed by the artist's imagination into the kinds of literature that San Remo Drive exemplifies.
• Writing and the Holocaust
  An analysis of how Hitler's war against the Jews was really a war against the Jewish imagination and why, therefore, the Holocaust was unique.
• A Visit To Auschwitz
  How a visit to Auschwitz causes a writer to re-imagine much of his life and think through the role of the artist in terrible times.

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