Background

Leonard Michaels was born on January 2, 1933, in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Leon and Anna Michaels. He grew up on the Lower East Side. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, and he spoke only Yiddish until the age of six. He had a sister, Carol Foresta, and a brother, David.

Education

In 1949 Leonard Michaels graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York City (later merged with the High School of Performing Arts to form the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & the Arts). Originally interested in art in high school, he switched to pre-med when he enrolled at New York University, but eventually changed his course of study to English. He completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953, moving on to earn a Master of Arts degree at the University of Michigan in 1956 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree there in 1966.

Career

Always interested in writing, especially short stories, which Leonard Michaels believed to be the best form of fiction, he began earning money as a freelance writer in the early 1960s. Although his first story was published in Playboy, he would later make a name for himself in literary journals such as Threepenny Review and the New Yorker. Michaels also enjoyed teaching, beginning as an instructor at William Paterson State College (now William Paterson University) from 1961 to 1962, moving on to the University of California at Davis during the late 1960s, and joining the Berkeley faculty as a professor of English in 1970, where he remained until he retired in 1994.

By the mid-1960s Michaels was already attracting attention as a writer, winning Quill awards from the Massachusetts Review in 1964 and 1966 for his short fiction. His first collection of short stories, Going Places (1969), was nominated for a National Book Award, and his second collection, Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975), was also highly acclaimed by critics. The Men's Club (1981), for which he wrote a movie adaptation released in 1986, is his best-known novel; it was nominated for the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Michaels wrote the short-story collections Shuffle (1990) and A Girl with a Monkey: New and Selected Stories (2000), as well as Sylvia: A Fictional Memoir (1992), To Feel These Things: Essays (1993), and Time out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995 (1999), among other publications.

Achievements

• Leonard Michaels was an acclaimed short story author who was also well known for his first novel, The Men's Club. The National Book Critics Circle nominated The Men's Club as the best novel of 1981. Michaels wrote the screenplay for a 1985 movie by the same name that was based on the book. Michaels' A Girl With a Monkey: New and Selected Stories was labeled the best fiction title of 2000 by the Los Angeles Times.
  
  Though never a prolific author, Michaels was regularly praised for the quality of his prose, and his work earned him the O. Henry Prize, the American Academy Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Foundation of the Arts and Humanities prize.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Time out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995

    (The critically acclaimed author of The Men's Club shares ...)

    1999
  • Sylvia

    (First acclaimed as a story-length memoir, then expanded i...)

    1992
  • To Feel These Things

    (Essays discuss the author's parents, Jewish immigrants fr...)

    2000
  • I Would Have Saved Them If I Could

    (Thirteen stories focus on both unexpected and carefully p...)

    1975
  • A Girl with a Monkey: New and Selected Stories

    ("Michaels, one of the most highly regarded contemporary A...)

    2000
  • Shuffle

    (Includes "Journal", "My Father", "To Feel These Things", ...)

    1990
  • The Men's Club

    (Seven men, friends and strangers, gather in a house in Be...)

    1981
  • A Cat

    (A cat is content to be a cat. A cat is not owned by anybo...)

    1995
  • Going Places 1969

Politics

Leonard Michaels described himself as an unpolitical man. Despite this, he took part in anti-Vietnam war protests in the San Francisco Bay area.

Views

Leonard Michaels cited the works of three writers who influenced him - Saul Bellow, Wallace Stevens, and Chekhov. He then wrote: "Finally, the writer who influences me more than any other: Isaac Babel. I never talk about his work."

Quotations: "Stories should be natural as apples, brief as lust, long as a thought."

"Adultery is not about sex or romance. Ultimately, it is about how little we mean to one another."

"Looking at a cat, like looking at clouds or stars or the ocean, makes it difficult to believe there is nothing miraculous in this world."

"Of mystery there is no end. Of clarity, there is precious little."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "He was one of the most important prose writers of 20th century America - a writer whose sentences were composed with the care of poetry, and whose voice came through clearly in both fiction and nonfiction," - Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review.

Interests

• Writers

  Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, Saul Bellow, Wallace Stevens, Anton Chekhov

Connections

Leonard Michaels was married first to Sylvia Bloch of New York, who committed suicide in 1963. He met his second wife, Priscilla Older in Ann Arbor, and they came together to Berkeley where his sons Ethan and Jesse were born. His third wife was the poet Brenda Hillman, whom he met in Iowa City in 1975 and married in 1976 in Berkeley. They had one daughter, Louisa. He married Katharine Ogden in 1994, and they lived in Italy, dividing their time between the Tuscan countryside and Rome.

Father:

Leon Michaels

Mother:

Anna Michaels

Spouse:

Katharine Ogden

Daughter:

Louisa Alice Michaels

Son:

Ethan Michaels

Son:

Jesse Michaels

ex-spouse:

Brenda Lynn Hillman

ex-spouse:

Priscilla Drake Older

late spouse:

Sylvia Bloch

Brother:

David Michaels

Sister:

Carol Foresta

colleague:

Alex Zwerdling

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2011