Biography Essay

Born in New York City on 28June 1947, Mark Helprin is the son of Eleanor Lynn and Morris Helprin. Morris Helprin, the son of emigres, was a movie critic for The New York Times who later served in the publicity department of major film companies and still later became president of London Films. Mark Helprin grew up in New York City, the Hudson River Valley, and the British West Indies. He received a B.A. degree from Harvard University in 1969, and it was while he was an undergraduate that, at the age of twenty-one, he sold his first story to The New Yorker. Although he did not feel comfortable at Harvard, Helprin nonetheless speaks well of the sort of humanistic education he encountered there as an important preparation for coping with the contradictions and paradoxes of life. In 1972 he completed his studies at the Harvard Center for...