Background
Mendelsohn was born on April 16, 1960 in Long Island, New York, United States; the son of Jay and Marlene Jaeger Mendelsohn.
2017
Daniel Mendelsohn with Rebecca Mead at LIVE from the NYPL.
Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
University of Virginia
Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Princeton University
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, United States
Bard College
Berlin, Germany
American Academy
Rome, Italy
American Academy
Venezia, Italy
Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Mendelsohn and Rebecca Mead at the New York Public Library.
Daniel Mendelsohn and his father, Jay Mendelsohn.
(The first full-length study of Children of Herakles and S...)
The first full-length study of Children of Herakles and Suppliant Women to appear in fifty years, Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays uses fresh insights into the Greek conception of gender and the Athenian ideology of civic identity to demonstrate at last the formal elegance and intellectual complexity of two works that are still dismissed as artistic failures within the poet's oeuvre.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001KW005C/?tag=2022091-20
2003
(Whether he's on Broadway or at the movies, considering a ...)
Whether he's on Broadway or at the movies, considering a new bestseller or revisiting a literary classic, Daniel Mendelsohn's judgments over the past fifteen years have provoked and dazzled with their deep erudition, disarming emotionality, and tart wit. Now How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken reveals all at once the enormous stature of Mendelsohn's achievement and demonstrates why he is considered one of our greatest critics. Writing with a lively intelligence and arresting originality, he brings his distinctive combination of scholarly rigor and conversational ease to bear across eras, cultures, and genres, from Roman games to video games. His interpretations of our most talked-about films - from the work of Pedro Almodóvar to Brokeback Mountain, from United 93 and World Trade Center to 300, Marie Antoinette, and The Hours - have sparked debate and changed the way we watch movies. Just as stunning and influential are his dispatches on theater and literature, from The Producers to Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, from The Lovely Bones to the works of Harold Pinter. Together these thirty brilliant and engaging essays passionately articulate the themes that have made Daniel Mendelsohn a crucial voice in today's cultural conversation: the aesthetic and indeed political dangers of imposing contemporary attitudes on the great classics; the ruinous effect of sentimentality on the national consciousness in the post-9/11 world; the vital importance of the great literature of the past for a meaningful life in the present. How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken makes it clear that no other contemporary thinker is as engaged with as many aspects of our culture and its influences as Mendelsohn is, and no one practices the vanishing art of popular criticism with more acuity, humor, and feeling.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001DF4GWY/?tag=2022091-20
2009
(Hailed for its searing emotional insights, and for the as...)
Hailed for its searing emotional insights, and for the astonishing originality with which it weaves together personal history, cultural essay, and readings of classical texts by Sophocles, Ovid, Euripides, and Sappho, The Elusive Embrace is a profound exploration of the mysteries of identity. It is also a meditation in which the author uses his own divided life to investigate the "rich conflictedness of things," the double lives all of us lead. Daniel Mendelsohn recalls the deceptively quiet suburb where he grew up, torn between his mathematician father's pursuit of scientific truth and the exquisite lies spun by his Orthodox Jewish grandfather; the streets of manhattan's newest "gay ghetto," where "desire for love" competes with "love of desire;" and the quiet moonlit house where a close friend's small son teaches him the meaning of fatherhood. And, finally, in a neglected Jewish cemetery, the author uncovers a family secret that reveals the universal need for storytelling, for inventing myths of the self.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006L7RGZI/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(In Waiting for the Barbarians, he brings together twenty-...)
In Waiting for the Barbarians, he brings together twenty-four of his recent essays—each one glinting with “verve and sparkle,” “acumen and passion”—on a wide range of subjects, from Avatar to the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, from our inexhaustible fascination with the Titanic to Susan Sontag’s Journals. Trained as a classicist, author of two internationally best-selling memoirs, Mendelsohn moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters (Greek myth in the Spider-Man musical, Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho) to trenchant takes on pop spectacles—none more explosively controversial than his dissection of Mad Men. Also gathered here are essays devoted to the art of fiction, from Jonathan Littell’s Holocaust blockbuster The Kindly Ones to forgotten gems like the novels of Theodor Fontane. In a final section, “Private Lives,” prefaced by Mendelsohn’sNew Yorker essay on fake memoirs, he considers the lives and work of writers as disparate as Leo Lerman, Noël Coward, and Jonathan Franzen. Waiting for the Barbarians once again demonstrates that Mendelsohn’s “sweep as a cultural critic is as impressive as his depth.”
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007B2FRZI/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search fo...)
In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic - part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work - that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DG29334/?tag=2022091-20
2013
critic essayist translator author
Mendelsohn was born on April 16, 1960 in Long Island, New York, United States; the son of Jay and Marlene Jaeger Mendelsohn.
Mendelsohn received a Bachelor of Arts degree in classics from the University of Virginia in 1982. Seven years later he was given a Master of Arts degree and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1994 from Princeton University.
Mendelsohn began his career as an assistant to an opera impresario, Joseph A. Scuro, in New York City in 1982 and held it for three years. Since 1991 he has been a prolific contributor of essays, reviews and articles to many publications, including "The New Yorker" and "The New York Review of Books".
In 1994, Daniel was appointed a part-time lecturer of the Classics department at Princeton University and held it for six years. Then in 2000, he became a weekly book critic for New York Magazine, where he worked until 2002. Since 2002 Mendelsohn has served as a Charles Ranlett Flint Chair in Humanities at Bard College, where he teaches one course each semester on literary subjects.
In April 2008, he was the Richard Holbrooke Distinguished visitor at the American Academy in Berlin. In addition, in the Spring of 2010, Daniel held a position of a critic-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome and a visiting writer at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice in April 2014. He was also a columnist for the "Bookends" page at The New York Times Book Review from 2013 to 2014. Daniel served as a weekly book critic for BBC Worldwide and Harper’s.
In 2009, he published an acclaimed translation, with commentary, of the complete works of the Alexandrian Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, which included the first English translation of the poet’s "Unfinished Poems".
(The first full-length study of Children of Herakles and S...)
2003(In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search fo...)
2013(In Waiting for the Barbarians, he brings together twenty-...)
2012(Hailed for its searing emotional insights, and for the as...)
2012(Whether he's on Broadway or at the movies, considering a ...)
2009Mendelsohn is a member of Modern Greek Studies Association, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Philosophical Association.