One critic has called you “the best novelist of America,” adding that “no one else better understands the nuances of American class.” Your The Two Mrs. Greenvilles, People Like Us, An Inconvenient Woman, A Season in Purgatory, and Another City, Not My Own bring to life stories of the powerful and notorious. Your eye as participant observer of the nation’s mover-and-shaker class also informs your revealing profiles, collected in Fatal Charm and The Mansions of Limbo, that have bolstered the resurgence of the magazine Vanity Fair. Underlying all this work has been the passion and compassion born from the wrestling you have had to do with the demons that have challenged your own life. The most forceful and tragic of these was the killing of your daughter, Dominique, which brought to an end your successful career as film producer and launched your role as a teller of moral tales. It has inspired also your vigorous work for the National Center for Victims of Crime. Compassion is the keynote of all your work, which explains why, as commentators have often noted with awe, your subjects open up and say things to you that they have never told anyone else. May your remarkable skills as social anthropologist long continue to reveal the rights and wrongs of a society still groping to find its moral bearings.
Megamenu Social