Born in New York City on 28June 1947, Mark Helprin is the son of Eleanor Lynn and Morris Helprin. Morris Helprin, the son of emigres, was a movie critic for The New York Times who later served in the publicity department of major film companies and...

Reviewing Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men in today's New York Times, reviewer Michiko Kakutani laments that the novel's "lugubrious passages...gain ascendency as the book progresses." And Kakutani knows from ascendant lugubriousness. Six days earlier, the Pulitzer-winning critic labeled John Irving's latest work, Until...

Arriving late at an elegant London dinner party, the narrator of "Tamar," a short story in Mark Helprin's "Ellis Island, and Other Stories," is seated at the "children's table," as a kind of genteel punishment. (The time is close to the start of World War II; the narrator is in London on a mission that fails—raising escape funds for European Jewry.) The teenagers in attendance are new to him and charming—lively, intelligent, dream-ridden....

[Mark Helprin's] stories are an astonishment of imaginative virtuosity, written with measured and rather stately elegance about a prodigious variety of places, times, and persons. A Dove of the East opens with a Persian Jew in Israel who thinks he is the devil's prey, and it moves on to stories about a Spanish widow in the mountains of northern New Mexico; an American priest dying in Rome; a Civil War battle in Virginia; a cattle rancher in Jamaica whose herd is destroyed by a bull…. A ...

One can understand the impatience of writers with the demands and constrictions of realistic fiction. Many of them perceive it as an exhausted mode, though realism (like a sick king who has had to surrender whole provinces) still holds a position of shaky dominance…. Is the situation ripe for a romantic revival such as seems to be occurring in music and painting? Instead of attempting painstakingly to create an acceptable simulacrum of the world as we (at least some of us) experience it, or to forge ...