Born in Manhattan, educated at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford, Mark Helprin is a former Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.
As a novelist and short story writer, he has received countless awards and accolades including the World Fantasy Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Prix de Rome, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and others. As a journalist and conservative commentator, he served as a speechwriter and foreign policy advisor for Bob Dole.
Since 1975, he has written more than a dozen novels and short story collections, many of them bestsellers, almost all of them critically lauded. In 2006, the New York Times Book Review sent a letter to hundreds of writers, editors, critics, and literary scholars, asking them to name the “single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.” Helprin’s novel Winter’s Tale was among the fewer than two-dozen books to receive more than one vote.
For those looking to explore this celebrated author, these eight Mark Helprin books provide a perfect place to start.
Winter's Tale
Mark Helprin’s best-known work is this “utterly extraordinary” (New York Times Book Review) novel of magical realism in Belle Epoque New York that “creates tableaux of such beauty and clarity that the inner eye is stunned” (Publishers Weekly).
Peter Lake is a poor mechanic and occasional burglar whose immigrant parents were turned away at Ellis Island. When he breaks into a sprawling Upper West Side mansion, he finds more than he bargained for as he falls in love with the house’s occupant, a spirited young woman who is dying of consumption in this “book of wonders” (Vanity Fair) that was adapted to the 2014 movie of the same name starring Colin Farrell, Jennifer Connelly, Russell Crowe, and Will Smith.
A Soldier of the Great War
Alessandro Giullani is a septuagenarian and a veteran of the First World War who is on a trip to visit his granddaughter when he tells his life story to a young man he meets after both are thrown off a bus.
Spending eight weeks on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list, this “testimony to the indomitable human spirit” (Library Journal) showcases Helprin’s love of language with its “energetic, often lyrical prose capable of poetic images of great intensity, coupled with an antic imagination unleashed in scenes of high adventure and bizarre and droll events” (Publishers Weekly).
Paris in the Present Tense
“A masterpiece filled with compassion and humanity” (Kirkus Reviews), Paris in the Present Tense is a story about a 74-year-old cellist in Paris who finds his life and his principles challenged by risk, by peril, and by love. Chosen as a “PEOPLE picks” book by PEOPLE magazine, this “enchanting” novel “produces a kind of music that few living writers know how to create” (Wall Street Journal).
As he engages in fraud to try to save the life of his infant grandson, Jules Lacour also stumbles into a “complex” love affair “haunted by time” in this book filled with “aching beauty” (Boston Globe).
Freddy and Fredericka
Having stated that he “belongs to no literary school, movement, tendency, or trend,” Mark Helprin’s novels span a wide array of styles and subject matter, but one that he rarely turns his attention to is satire, as he does in Freddy and Fredericka, which the New York Times calls “great silly fun—a rowdy, rambunctious read that’s part acid farce, part bittersweet fairy tale.”
It follows a royal power couple, modeled on Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, as they embark on a satiric romp through America in this bestseller that National Review hailed as one of the 10 best conservative novels written by Americans since the 1950s.
Memoir From Antproof Case
“Helprin is endlessly inventive” writes Publishers Weekly in praise of this ambitious and wide-ranging novel, written in the form of a memoir from an unnamed narrator, each page of which is locked in a termite-proof suitcase in the Brazilian jungle.
The result is a “rapturous and melancholy” (New York Times) book that could only have come from the proverbial pen of Mark Helprin, a dizzying tale of war, adventure, murder, love, and a lifelong campaign against coffee that led Library Journal to declare its narrator a “20th-century Don Quixote.”
Refiner's Fire
One of Mark Helprin’s earliest works, Refiner’s Fire was hailed by the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle as “that best of all possible novels: read ten pages and you can’t put it down; finish it and you’ll feel it haunt your days and nights.”
Originally published in 1977, it tells the story of an Israeli immigrant who is orphaned at birth, grows up in the Hudson Valley, and explores the world, only to return to the place of his birth in this “exhilarating, extravagant, vertiginous” (Boston Globe) novel that reads “as if The Odyssey had been updated and rewritten by Dylan Thomas” (The Listener).
Ellis Island
The immigrant experience is at the heart of many of Mark Helprin’s tales, and the eleven short “stories beyond compare” (Philadelphia Inquirer) contained in this collection, which was the winner of both the Prix de Rome and the National Jewish Book Award are no exception.
From the title novella, which deals with a Jewish immigrant who is determined to make it through the many protocols of the titular island, to stories of a Vermont blizzard and an English sea captain who encounters an ape adrift in the Indian Ocean, this award-winning collection “ascends to the peak of literary achievement” (Boston Globe).
A Dove of the East
In a “dazzling collection” (San Francisco Chronicle & Examiner) of twenty more short stories by the New York Times-bestselling and World Fantasy Award-winning Helprin, the author demonstrates his “total command of his imagined world in these stories of astonishing scope and power” (Chicago Tribune) which are a showcase for Helprin’s particular “kind of genius” (The Spectator).
From love in a typewriter-ribbon factory in the Bronx to a dying priest in Rome, these twenty short stories are a perfect introduction to Helprin’s unique writing.
