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Daniel Mendelsohn

American writer (born 1960) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Daniel Mendelsohn
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Daniel Adam Mendelsohn (born 1960) is an American author, essayist, critic, columnist, and translator.

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He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, the Editor at Large of the New York Review of Books, and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to supporting writers of nonfiction.

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Early life and education

Mendelsohn was born to a Jewish family[1] in New York City and raised on Long Island in the town of Old Bethpage, New York. He attended the University of Virginia from 1978 to 1982 as an Echols Scholar,[2] graduating with a B.A. summa cum laude in Classics.

From 1982 to 1985, he resided in New York City, working as an assistant to an opera impresario, Joseph A. Scuro.[3] The following year he began graduate studies at Princeton University, receiving his M.A. in 1989 and his Ph.D. in 1994. His dissertation, later published as a scholarly monograph by Oxford University Press, was on Euripidean tragedy.

Mendelsohn is one of five siblings. His brothers include film director Eric Mendelsohn and Matt Mendelsohn, a photographer; his sister, Jennifer Mendelsohn, also a journalist, is the founder of "#ResistanceGenealogy".[4][5] He is the nephew of the psychologist Allan Rechtschaffen. He is gay.[6]

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Career

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While still a graduate student, Mendelsohn began contributing reviews, op-eds, and essays to such publications as QW, Out, The New York Times, The Nation, and The Village Voice. After completing his Ph.D., he moved to New York City and began writing full-time.

Since then his review-essays on books, films, theater and television have appeared frequently in numerous major publications, most often in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Others include Town & Country (magazine), The New York Times Magazine, Travel + Leisure, Newsweek, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and Harper's magazine, where Mendelsohn was a culture columnist.

Between 2000 and 2002 he was the weekly book critic for New York Magazine. His reviews have also appeared frequently in The New York Times Book Review, where he was also a columnist for the "Bookends" page.

Mendelsohn is the author of ten books, including New York Times bestseller and international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), a Kirkus Best Memoir of the Year and winner of France's Prix Méditerrannée.

His book, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, published in 2020, was a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize) in France. In 2022 he was awarded the Premio Malaparte, Italy's highest honor for foreign writers, and was named a Chevalier de Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Government of France.

On 9 April 2025 his new translation of Homer's The Odyssey was published by the University of Chicago Press.[7]

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The New York Review of Books

Mendelsohn began contributing to the New York Review of Books early in 2000, and soon became a frequent contributor, publishing articles on a wide range of subjects including Greek drama and poetry, American and British theater, literature, television, and film.[8] Over time he became a close personal friend of the founding editor Robert B. Silvers and Silvers' partner, Grace, Countess of Dudley.[9]

During a period of editorial reorganization in the year and a half following Silvers' death, Mendelsohn was named the first Editor-at-Large of the Review, a position created for him by the publisher, Rea Hederman, to go alongside the editorship, which was then split between co-editors Emily Greenhouse and Gabriel Winslow-Yost.[10][11]

In February, 2019, Hederman also announced that Mendelsohn had been named Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, as per a stipulation in Silvers' will. The Foundation is dedicated to supporting writers of nonfiction of the kind Silvers fostered at the Review: long-form criticism and journalism and writing on arts and culture.[10]

Academic career and positions

Mendelsohn's academic speciality was Greek (especially Euripidean) tragedy; he has also published scholarly articles about Roman poetry[12] and Greek religion.[13] During the 1990s, he taught intermittently as a lecturer in the Classics department at Princeton University.[14] In the fall of 2006, he was named to the Charles Ranlett Flint Chair in Humanities at Bard College, where he currently teaches one course each semester on literary subjects.[15] His academic residencies have included the Richard Holbrooke Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany (2008);[16] Critic-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome (2010),[17] and Visiting writer at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice (2014). In March, 2019 he was in residence at the University of Virginia, where he gave the Page-Barbour Lectures.[18]

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Major works

  • On 9 April 2025 Mendelsohn's new translation of Homer's Odyssey was published by the University of Chicago Press.[19]
  • An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), a memoir intertwining a personal narrative about the author's late father, Jay, a retired research scientist who decided to enroll in his son's spring 2011 Odyssey seminar at Bard College, with reflections on the text of Homer's Odyssey and its theme of father-son relationships, education, and identity. The book, the third in which the author combines memoir and literary criticism, was published by Knopf in September 2017 to acclaim in the U.S., where it was named a Best Book of the Year by National Public Radio, Library Journal, Newsday, Kirkus Reviews, and The Christian Science Monitor, the U.K., where it was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, and France, where it won the 2018 Prix Méditerranée.
  • C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems and C. P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems, published simultaneously in March 2009. Mendelsohn's translation of the complete poetry of the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2009 and was shortlisted for the Criticos Prize (now the London Hellenic Prize). The two-volume hardcover edition was published as a single-volume paperback by Vintage Books in May 2012; a selection was published in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series in 2014.
  • The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), the story of the author's worldwide search over five years to learn about the fates of relatives who perished in the Holocaust, was published to wide acclaim in the US and throughout Europe. After the book's publication in a bestselling French translation, in 2007, film rights were optioned by director Jean-Luc Godard.
  • Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays, published by Oxford University Press in 2002,[20] was the first scholarly study in fifty years of two lesser-known plays of Euripides, "Children of Heracles" and "Suppliant Women." A paperback edition was published in 2005.
  • The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), a memoir entwining themes of gay identity, family history, and Classical myth and literature, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.
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Awards and honors

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Mendelsohn has been the recipient of numerous prizes and honors both in the United States and abroad. Apart from awards for individual books, these include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Harold D. Vursell Memorial Prize for Prose Style (2014); the American Philological Association President's Award for service to the Classics (2014); the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism (2002); and the National Book Critics Circle Award Citation for Excellence in Book Reviewing (2000)

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Bibliography

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Books

  • Mendelsohn, Daniel (1999). The elusive embrace : desire and the riddle of identity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
  • — (2002). Gender and the city in Euripides' political plays. Oxford University Press.
  • — (2006). The lost : a search for six of six million. HarperCollins.
  • — (2008). How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken. HarperCollins.
  • Cavafy, C. P. (2009). Collected poems. Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn.
  • — (2009). The unfinished poems. Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. New York: Knopf.
  • — (2012). Complete poems. Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. New York: Knopf.[32]
  • Mendelsohn, Daniel (2012). Waiting for the Barbarians : essays from the Classics to pop culture. New York: New York Review Books.
  • An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, Knopf, 2017.
  • The Bad Boy of Athens: Musing on Culture from Sappho to Spider-Man, William Collins, July 2019
  • Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, New York Review Books, October 2019[33]
  • Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, University of Virginia Press, September 2020
  • Homer: The Odyssey. Translated, with Introduction and Notes, by Daniel Mendelsohn. University of Chicago Press, April 9th, 2025.

Essays, reviews and reporting

See also lists of Mendelsohn's articles at New York Magazine, New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Town & Country Magazine, Harper's, Travel + Leisure.

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References

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External links

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