Background

Caleb Carr was born on August 2, 1955, in Manhattan, New York and lived for much of his life on the Lower East Side. He is one of three sons born to Beat Generation figure Lucien Carr and Francesca Von Hartz. His parents separated when he was five, and the balance of his childhood was spent in St. Louis.

Education

Carr received his primary education from St. Luke’s School in Greenwich Village and his secondary education from Friends Seminary. Caleb Carr attended Kenyon College and then subsequently New York University where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in history.

Career

Following the conferral of his degree in 1977, Caleb Carr was employed at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York where he eventually gained a position as a special editorial assistant for the journal Foreign Affairs Quarterly. After leaving the organization, he spent the 1980s working as a freelance journalist covering Central America.

These experiences influenced the first of Mr. Carr’s non-fiction books, America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars (1989), which he co-wrote with his friend and mentor, James Chace. His subsequent non-fiction publications have also focused on military history and national security, and include a biography of Frederick Townsend Ward, The Devil Soldier: The American Soldier of Fortune Who Became a God in China (1992), and an examination of the history of terrorism, The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians (2002). In addition, Mr. Carr has been the editor of Random House’s Modern Library War Series and has been a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. In the mid-2000s, he also spent a number of years teaching military history studies at Bard College as a Visiting Professor.

Outside of academia and journalism, Caleb Carr spent a number of years working in the film industry and the theatre whilst freelancing in the 1980s. His work in the film industry continued into the 1990s, and he was involved with several TV mini-series and films as a presenter, an executive producer, and a writer. Most notably, he wrote the TV movies Bad Attitudes (1991) and The Warlord: Battle for the Galaxy (1998), and was credited as a co-writer for Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist in 2004 and 2005, respectively. Testifying to his versatility, Mr. Carr started working as a librettist with a friend and composer Ezequiel Viñao in the 1990s on Merlin, an opera based on the Arthurian legends, and has also tried his hand at politics: he ran as a Democrat for the Rensselaer County Legislature in 2005 but was unsuccessful.

Despite these varying areas of interest, Mr. Carr is best known for his fiction. Although he has described his first novel Casing the Promised Land (1980) as “roman à clef nonsense”, his subsequent works have been highly successful. Starting in 1994 with The Alienist which won the 1995 Anthony Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for the 1995 Bram Stoker Best Novel Award, he has gone on to write other bestselling novels including The Angel of Darkness (1997) and The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes (2005). In 1999, Mr. Carr also wrote a serial for Time magazine, Killing Time, which was later published in book form. While all of these works were well received, the Alienist novels have been his most successful: The Alienist received considerable critical acclaim and spent six months on the New York Times bestseller list, while The Angel of Darkness received even greater acclaim and outsold The Alienist.

Caleb Carr released a historical novel, The Legend of Broken, in late 2012, and will be releasing Surrender, New York, a contemporary thriller with strong ties to the Alienist novels, on August 23, 2016. In a 2013 web chat, Mr. Carr also indicated that a third Alienist novel is planned. In addition to these writing projects, it was revealed in mid-2015 that Mr. Carr would also be acting as a consulting producer for the highly anticipated television adaptation of The Alienist that is currently in development with Paramount TV, Anonymous Content, and TNT.

Achievements

• Carr's chief achievement came with his breakout 1994 novel The Alienist - about a serial killer haunting the streets of Manhattan at the turn of the 20th century - Caleb Carr sprang to national attention. This novel won the 1995 Anthony Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for the 1995 Bram Stoker Best Novel Award. He has since written a number of other acclaimed novels, as well as nonfiction books in his other specialty: military history. His nonfiction pieces have appeared in such major publications as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Carr has also worked extensively in film, television, and the theater.

Works

More photos

• audio book

  • The Legend of Broken 2012

• book

  • The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians: Why It Has Always Failed and Why It Will Fail Again

    (In The Lessons of Terror, novelist and military historian...)

  • The Lessons of Terror

    (Military historian Caleb Carr’s groundbreaking work antic...)

    2002
  • The Devil Soldier

    (With the same flair for history and narrative that distin...)

    1992
  • The Italian Secretary

    (Mycroft Holmes's encoded message to his brother, Sherlock...)

    2005
  • Surrender

    (Doctor Trajan Jones, the world’s leading expert on the li...)

    2016
  • The Angel of Darkness

    (A year has passed since Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a pioneer in...)

    1997
  • The Alienist

    (The year is 1896. The city is New York. Newspaper reporte...)

    1994
  • Killing Time

    (Meet Dr. Gideon Wolfe, expert criminologist of the new Mi...)

    2000
  • Casing the Promised Land 1980
  • America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars 1989

Views

As a child, Caleb Carr promised himself that he'd never become a writer. Although his father, Lucien, was a seminal figure of the beat generation, and Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs were habitues of the turbulent family home, they were far from role models. "They were noisy drunks that were a disruption," Carr says. "They made me determined never to be a fiction writer." Although Carr broke his pledge, his work couldn't be further removed from the beats. Carr is now better placed than most to write about violence. From his formal background as a military historian to his four intricately plotted mystery novels, Carr's writing could even be regarded as a rejection of the blind emotion promoted by his father's crowd.

Quotations: "I had a lifelong fascination with all forms of violence, from war to personal violence, the latter being what I had the most experience with in my life, whether from the troubles with my father or battles on the streets of Manhattan... And that interest eventually evolved into wanting to understand the roots of violence... I found I was developing a particular interest in psychological profiling, and the work being done at the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia."

“I was the one my father singled out for abuse,” he said. “I made sure the abuse was going to end with me. It’s always there. For people who have suffered abuse, there is always the danger you’ll fall into the same trap.”

"I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. I spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason."

"We're heading into an era when much of the progress that was made over the past two centuries is under attack - progress in social policy, in environmental policy, education, hygiene, medicine, name the area. Yet most people claim this is a more spiritual age. That probably is the problem. Faith leads to wars and the erosion of civilization, far more quickly than reason."

Personality

From early childhood, Caleb Carr grew up in the household that was not a safe place for him and his brothers. According to Carr, his father was an alcoholic, psychologically abusive to his mother and brothers, often singling out Caleb, the middle son, for physical abuse that continued even after his parents divorced when he was eight. Carr says he was an angry child, indignant at the "abusive set of circumstances that I didn't have the power to change, and about which I wasn't allowed to complain".

The violence in the Carr family engulfed two generations. Lucien Carr was a fatherless boy in St. Louis in the 1930’s. He was embraced and sexually abused by his Scoutmaster David Kammerer for almost a decade. Kammerer proceeded to stalk Lucien Carr across the Midwest and followed him to New York when he went to Columbia. Lucien killed his abusive stalker in 1944 and dumped the body in the Hudson River. He pled guilty to manslaughter and served two years in prison. The Kammerer murder became the original sin of the Beat Generation.

So, Carr's best hobby - playing the guitar gave him a pretty awesome way to release some emotions. During his time freelancing and directing, he also was a member of a bar band called Hell and High Water.

Interests

• music

• Writers

  Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

Connections

Carr is intentionally resisting to marriage. He is single and admits to being inept at forming relationships. "People who have known violence in childhood have a great deal of trouble trusting or achieving intimacy. When you add bad selections into the mix, you lose the taste for even trying." He has lived the majority of his life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, spending his summers and many weekends at his family's home in Cherry Plain, New York. In 2000, he purchased his own property, known as Misery Mountain, in Cherry Plain; and in 2006 he moved there permanently. He currently shares his home with his Siberian cat, Masha.

Father:

Lucien Carr

Lucien Carr (March 1, 1925 – January 28, 2005) was a key member of the original New York City circle of the Beat Generation in the 1940s; later he worked for many years as an editor for United Press International.

Mother:

Francesca Von Hartz

Brother:

Simon Carr

Brother:

Ethan Carr

collaborator:

James Chace

James Clarke Chace (October 16, 1931 – October 8, 2004) was an American historian, writing on American diplomacy and statecraft. His 12 books include the critically acclaimed Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World (1998), the definitive biography of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

References

• Caleb Carr and The Alienist Books Caleb Carr news plus author biography, summaries, and timelines for The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness, synopses of Caleb Carr's other works, and more.