Perspective

Richard E. Kim, the author of Lost Names, was born in Hamheung, North Korea in 1932. Kim entered the United States in 1955, after he served from 1950-1954 in the Republic of Korea Marines and Army. He is a naturalized U.S. citizen who attended several American universities from 1955 to 1963. He earned a masters degree in writing at Johns Hopkins University and a masters in Far Eastern languages and literature from Harvard University in 1963. He was Fulbright professor at Seoul National University in 1981-83. He wrote fourteen published original works in both English and Korean from 1964 to 1984 and received awards from the Ford Foundation, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship among others.

Kim was born in Korea in 1932 and lived there through the time period of the book 1945, and beyond to 1955. He grew up in Korea as a boy like one in Lost Names. Although the work...