Born in lower Manhattan on 2 January 1933 to Leon (a barber) and Anna Czeskies Michaels, Polish-Jewish immigrants, and raised in the city during the Depression, Leonard Michaels seems not to have pictured himself as a writer until, in the mid 1950s, he entered graduate school as a student of English literature (having earned his B.A. at New York University in 1953). He tried one graduate-school program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (where he received his M.A. in 1956), then another at the University of California in Berkeley, but, discontented with the study of English literature, he withdrew from graduate school and moved to Manhattan, where in 1960 he began to write stories in earnest. He was married for the first time (to Sylvia Bloch), and to eke out a living he also taught English classes at Paterson State College in Wayne, New Jersey. As related in his...