Mark Helprin was born on June 28, 1947, in New York City, the son of Morris, a motion picture executive, and Eleanor Helprin. He was raised in New York City, the Hudson River Valley, and the British West Indies. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1969. While he was an undergraduate, at the age of twenty-one, he sold his first story to the New Yorker. He received a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1972 and then did postgraduate work at Oxford University in England and at Princeton and Columbia in the United States. He has served in the British Merchant Navy, and from 1972 to 1973, he served in the Israeli infantry and the Israeli Air Force. On June 28, 1980, he married Lisa Kennedy, a tax lawyer and a vice president of Chase Manhattan Bank. As...