Louis Begley - A Life like a Novel

The author Louis Begley was born in Poland in 1933 under the name of Ludwig Begleiter. His family was Jewish and Begley survived the Nazi occupation of Poland pretending to be a Polish catholic. After the Second World War, he and his parents left the country.

Louis Begley settled down in the United States in 1947. During the 1950s, he studied law at Harvard. After graduating, he began to pursue a legal career. Today, he is a senior partner at one of America's most prestigious law firms, Debevoise & Plimpton.

Louis Begley began writing late in life: he finished his first novel Wartime Lies at the age of 56. It tells the story of a family of Polish Jews fleeing from the Nazis. Wartime Lies is partly based on Begley's own experiences as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Poland: "It is really very hard on a person that age - a child - to be told that actually you are someone who should be exterminated," Begley says.

Wartime Lies was celebrated as much for its interesting background as for Begley's style of writing. The book won numerous prizes, among them the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the Prix Médicis Étranger, the highest award for fiction in translation in France.

After Wartime Lies, Louis Begley wrote The Man Who Was Late, As Max Saw It, About Schmidt, Schmidt Delivered and Mistler's Exit. In his own words, his books "are all concerned with death and why we have such a rough time with the relationship between merit and punishment."