Louis Begley became an American citizen in 1953. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1954, Begley served in the United States Army until 1956. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1959 and was immediately hired by the prestigious New York firm Debevoise and Plimpton. Specializing in international corporate law, Begley eventually became a senior partner in the firm and head of its international practice group. In 1956 he married Sally Higginson, with whom he had three children (Peter, Amey, and Adam) before their divorce in 1970. In 1974 he married writer Anne Muhlenstein Dujarric de la Riviere.
Wartime Lies, which Begley wrote during a four-month sabbatical from Debevoise and Plimpton, earned immediate acclaim for its novice author. The novel began as a book about his father. Judith Grossman hailed it in The New York Times (5 May 1991) as "masterly," and in The New York Review of Books (13 June 1991) Janet Malcolm called it "a meditation on authoritarianism of great subtlety and originality." Begley's extraordinary debut won the Irish Times-Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, the PEN/Ernest Hemingway First Fiction Award, and the Prix Médicis Etranger in France; it was also a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle fiction prize.
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