Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Cynthia Ozick was born in Manhattan and has lived in the New
York City area most of her life. She attended Hunter College High School,
graduated Phi Beta Kappa from New York University with honors in English, and
holds a master’s degree from Ohio State University. She lives in Westchester
County and is married to Bernard Hallote, a retired lawyer. Their daughter,
Rachel S. Hallote, an archaeologist, is the director of the Jewish studies
program at the State University of New York at Purchase.
She is acclaimed for her many works of fiction and criticism. She was a finalist
for the National Book Award for her previous novel, The Puttermesser Papers,
which was named one of the top ten books of the year by the New York Times
Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Her most recent essay collection, Quarrel & Quandary, won the 2001
National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Ozick’s work has been
translated into thirteen languages worldwide. Her classic novella The Shawl
was produced for the stage in New York, directed by Sidney Lumet.
Without question, Cynthia Ozick is among the major living
American writers. She has published widely — beginning with the novel Trust
in 1966. Over the years she has written poems, short stories, essays, novels,
and plays. Among them: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971); Art
& Ardor: Essays (1983); The Cannibal Galaxy (1983); The
Messiah of Stockholm (1987); Metaphor & Memory: Essays (1989); The
Shawl (1989); Epodes: The First Poems (1992); Portrait of the
Artist as a Bad Character and Other Essays on Writing (1994); and Fame
& Folly (1996). Her many awards include a Guggenheim fellowship and the
Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters.
She has the unique honor of being the first writer to be given
the Rea Award for the Short Story. In making their selection, the jurors said:
"A writer of great intelligence, moral energy, and imaginative power,
Cynthia Ozick has appreciably widened the range of what the short story is able
to be . . . Reading The Shawl, we are moved past the truth of fact to a
deeper, different understanding; we bear witness to the truth of art. Only
rarely does this happen, and when it does, it must be celebrated."
She published Heir To The Glimmering World in 2004 and Foreign Bodies in 2010.
This bio was last updated on 10/20/2016. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
In Heir to the Glimmering World there are several actual
heirs, including the profligate James A’Bair — a character inspired by the
son of A. A. Milne, creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. What was the source of this
inspiration?
Some time ago I happened on the obituary of Christopher Milne,
A. A. Milne’s grown son, whom we know mainly through Ernest Shepard’s
indelible illustrations of a small boy in short pants. At his death he was the
owner of a bookshop hidden away in the north of England, having attempted all
his life to slough off his identification with Pooh and Eeyore and all the rest.
He wanted to flee from the artifice of his father’s creation: he longed to
become an autonomous adult, to be a man, not the object of nostalgic
pilgrimages to a living shrine not of his making. Or so I thought, reading that
obituary notice. In my novel the character inspired by Christopher Robin is
named James A’Bair, eventually to be dubbed the Bear Boy. The Bear Boy
struggles to climb out of what Thomas Mann called "the well of the
past," the past that has immured him in an imaginary childhood. His
single-minded aim is to escape being costumed forever in lace collar and rouged
knees, forever five ...
Author of three New York Times best-sellers and three collections of short stories, a children's book (another coming in 2022) and a ground-breaking collection of essays. Bloom has been a nominee for both the National Book ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Heir To The Glimmering World
Try:
Away
by Amy Bloom
Pete Hamill was born in Brooklyn, N. Y. in 1935, the oldest of seven children of immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He attended Catholic schools, leaving school at 16 to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a sheet ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Heir To The Glimmering World
Try:
North River
by Pete Hamill
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