American · b. 1933
Louis Begley escaped Nazi-occupied Poland as a child, hidden by his family's false identity papers. He became a corporate lawyer in New York, then began writing fiction in his fifties. "Wartime Lies" (1991) draws on his childhood—a young boy and his aunt moving through occupied Poland, surviving by performance and luck. The novel won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Begley writes with the precision of a lawyer and the memory of someone who cannot afford to forget.