SOURCE: Begley, Louis, and James Atlas. “Louis Begley: The Art of Fiction CLXXII.” Paris Review 44, no. 162 (summer 2002): 110-43.

In the following interview, Begley discusses the difference between autobiography and fictionalization in his novels, lists his favorite authors and works of literature, and defends his protagonists against the charge of being unlikable and unsympathetic.

Louis Begley was a lawyer with the distinguished white-shoe firm of Debevoise & Plimpton when he surprised his colleagues—and the literary world—by publishing his first novel, Wartime Lies, about a young Polish Jew caught up in the inferno of the Holocaust. The novel appeared in 1991, when Begley was fifty-seven, and had great success, winning the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for a First Work of Fiction and the Irish Times-Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize. In the decade since, Begley has published five novels: The Man Who Was Late (1992), As Max Saw It (1994), About Schmidt...