Louis Begley (born 1933) is a Polish-born American novelist. During World War II, he survived the Nazi occupation by concealing his Jewish identity; after the war, his family settled in the United States. He worked as a lawyer and published his first novel in his fifties. Set in wartime Poland, “Wartime Lies” follows a boy named Maciek and his aunt as they change names, use false papers, and move from place to place to avoid discovery. The novel won the PEN/Hemingway Award. In “About Schmidt,” a retired lawyer’s carefully ordered life comes apart after his wife dies. Albert Schmidt faces an unwanted early retirement and objects to his daughter’s choice of husband, exposing prejudices he struggles to acknowledge and widening the distance between them.
