Memoirs of a Geisha Author Biography

Memoirs of a Geisha Author Biography

Memoirs of a Geisha, published in 1997, is Arthur Golden's debut novel. The bestselling novel was a long time in the making; Golden spent more than ten years on the novel, throwing out the first two drafts before finding his "voice" in the first-person account that was a publishing success.

Golden was born in 1957 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to a family of journalists. His parents, Ben and Ruth, published the Chattanooga Times, and in the early 2000s his cousin, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, published the New York Times. Golden's parents divorced when he was eight, and his father died five years later. Golden relates this to his challenges with the Chairman's character as Sayuri's love interest. Because his father was absent for much of his childhood, Golden struggled to make the character and the relationship believable. Golden attended Harvard College (the school of fine arts at Harvard University), where he...
(read more)