Louis Begley was fifty-seven when he published his first novel, Wartime Lies, in 1991, four decades after the wartime experiences that he shaped into fiction. Begley had arrived in the United States after the Holocaust, and his novels are written...

THE MAN WHO WAS LATE By Louis Begley. Knopf. 243 pp. $21. Gail Caldwell is book editor of the Globe. In 1991, a slender, ominously beautiful novel appeared -- almost out of nowhere, it seemed -- called "Wartime Lies." It was...

The award-winning novels of Louis Begley are all focused on justice or the lack of it. Begley's philosophy was molded when he was a rich Jewish boy who escaped the Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. Begley wonders on how God fails...

The power of Louis Begley’s Matters of Honor sneaks up on the reader softly. The story is told with a quiet control that deepens into silence, which is to say that it is as much constructed from suppressions and elisions as from anything actually stated....

Picture a character like Entourage’s Ari Gold or Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko. He’s high-powered, hard-driving, arrogant, misanthropic and politically incorrect. He has a knack for turning out bitter bon mots that simultaneously frighten and amuse. Now imagine him as the hiring partner at one of...

In the following essay, Hepburn discusses The Man Who Was Late within a psychoanalytic context and in relation to postmodern literary thought.

In the following interview, Begley discusses the difference between autobiography and fictionalization in his novels, lists his favorite authors and works of literature, and defends his protagonists against the charge of being unlikable and unsympathetic.

In the following essay, Alexander considers the use of irony in Begley's novels, asserting that the most sympathetic characters undergo difficult and painful experiences, but that Schmidt, Begley's least appealing character, is extremely fortunate.