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The Author, 2017. Æ T 70

Mark Helprin

Mark Helprin belongs to no literary school, movement, tendency, or trend. As many have observed, and as Time Magazine has phrased it, “He lights his own way.” His three collections of short stories (A Dove of the East and Other Stories, Ellis Island and Other Stories, and The Pacific and Other Stories), seven novels (Refiner’s Fire, Winter’s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir From Antproof Case, Freddy and Fredericka, In Sunlight and in Shadow, and Paris in the Present Tense), and three children’s books (Swan Lake, A City in Winter, and The Veil of Snows, all illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg), speak eloquently. Learn more

Most Recently Paris in the Present Tense

A rhetorician . . . would fail to account for the intensely lyrical voice that both heightens and deepens every sentence, at times attaining a kind of Joycean beauty. . . . Part of this force comes from the images that fly off Helprin’s sentences like glitter from a sparkler. . . . Helprin’s generosity of language allows room for missteps as well as brilliance. His Paris does exist in the present tense, irresistibly, undeniably real and alive, as though summoned by its creator rather than imagined. In this the novel performs perfectly the function of literature, which is not to escape the world but to enter completely into it.

– The New York Times Book Review

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Selected Interviews and Essays

Chicago, Æ T 65
Chicago, Æ T 65

Chicago Humanities Festival Interview

[Live From Printer’s Row, Nov. 4, 2012] From the 2012 Chicago Humanities Festival, Mark Helprin sits down for a wide-ranging one hour interview with the Chicago Tribune’s James Janega. Watch the video of this interview on YouTube

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By Starlight Undiminished

By Starlight Undiminished: How the American Landscape Shaped the Founding. On behalf of the Second Continental Congress in declaring America’s independence, Jefferson in the first paragraph of the Declaration drew upon authority greater than the Crown, the British Empire, and the long traditions of English law and government. “With a firm Reliance on the protection…

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Mark Helprin, His Life and Work

Socrates in the City, 2019    

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Falling Into Eternity

In the tumultuous sixties, as an undergraduate at Harvard (for which I have prayed for forgiveness most of my life), I was disappointed again and again by the common Victorian and early twentieth-century convention of beginning a chapter with lush description and then abandoning it in favor of social interaction, philosophical reflection, and plot development.…

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Speaking Freely

The wars about English are fought predominantly on the battlefields of grammar, syntax, and general usage. Unlike French, as puritan in regard to adoption as are the Japanese in regard to immigration, English has always promiscuously embraced anything that washes up on its shores. Partly because of its Norse, Teutonic, and Latinate roots; the world-spanning…

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Bibliography

Bibliography: In process  

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