Jerome Charyn


Jerome Charyn is an American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life, writing in multiple genres.
Michael Chabon calls him "one of the most important writers in American literature." New York Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac," and the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."
Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, was published in 1964. With Blue Eyes, the debut of detective character Isaac Sidel, Charyn attracted wide attention and acclaim. As of 2017, Charyn has published 37 novels, three memoirs, nine graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Fiction, 1983. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter by the French Minister of Culture.
Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching.
In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong."
Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.

Early life

Charyn was born in the Bronx to Sam and Fanny Charyn. In order to escape its mean streets, Charyn immersed himself in comic books and cinema. Books were scarce in the Charyn household, save for volume "A" of the Book of Knowledge. After becoming all too well versed in astronomy and aardvarks, Charyn hungered for more. He attended The High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, majoring in painting. Turning from painting to literature, Charyn enrolled at Columbia University, where he studied history and comparative literature with a focus on Russian literature, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and cum laude.

Teaching career

From 1962 through 1964, Charyn taught at his alma mater, Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, and at High School of Performing Arts, popularized in the movie Fame.
Charyn lectured in English at the City College of New York in 1965. He was assistant professor of English at Stanford University from 1965 to 1968. He served as a visiting professor in colleges across the country, including Rice University in 1979 and Princeton University, from 1981 until 1986. From 1988 to 1989, Charyn was Distinguished Professor at the City College of New York.
From 1995 to 2008, Charyn taught film at American University of Paris, where he is Distinguished Professor emeritus.
Charyn serves on the advisory board of the Laboratoire d'Études et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone, a research centre at Aix-Marseille University.

Literary career

Charyn often returns to his native Bronx in many of his writings, including a book appropriately named El Bronx. Michael Woolf, who wrote Exploding the Genre: The Crime Fiction of Jerome Charyn, says of Charyn: "Of all the novelists characterized as Jewish-American, Charyn is the most radical and inventive. There is in the body of his work a restless creativity which constantly surprises and repeatedly undermines the reader's expectation."
One of Charyn's best-known protagonists is Isaac Sidel, a Jewish New York police detective turned mayor, who is the subject of eleven crime novels, including Blue Eyes and Citizen Sidel. Charyn became interested in writing a crime novel after discovering Ross Macdonald's The Galton Case. What impressed Charyn most was narrative voice of sleuth Lew Archer—at once sympathetic and detached, who "deliver both a landscape and a past without least hint of sentimentality." The experiences of Charyn's brother, Harvey, an NYPD homicide detective, added authenticity to this popular series, which attracted a cult following worldwide. After the limited success of his earlier works, Charyn considered publishing the first Sidel novel under what he described as the Marrano pen name of Joseph da Silva, but was convinced by his agent to use his birth name.
The ten books were translated into seven languages and remained in print for three decades. In 1991, Charyn co-produced and co-wrote a TV pilot starring Ron Silver as The Good Policemen. More recently, in April, 2012, Otto Penzler, founder of Mysterious Press, reissued the entire series as eBooks, co-published by Open Road Media. The October, 2012, publication of Under the Eye of God, the first new Sidel thriller in a decade, rebooted the series ahead of a planned adult animated TV drama, to be titled Hard Apple.
Charyn's eight graphic novels were teamed him up with artists like Jacques de Loustal, José Antonio Muñoz and François Boucq, together with whom he won the 1998 Angoulême Grand Prix. Much of his writing in this genre was influenced by the comic books he devoured as a child. Charyn himself says comic books helped him learn to read.
Charyn's books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Chinese and 11 other languages. Charyn served as judge for the 2011 National Book Awards in Fiction. He is represented by the literary agency headed by Georges Borchardt.
Charyn's personal papers are held by the Fales Library at New York University.

''The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson''

The publication of his 2010 novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson stirred a great deal of controversy. Some critics felt that Charyn was much too brazen in writing in poet Emily Dickinson's voice and surrounding her with invented characters. The New York Times said this "fits neatly into the flourishing genre of literary body-snatching." In the San Francisco Chronicle, the novel was called a "bodice-ripper."
Other critics saw the work as a magical tour de force. Joyce Carol Oates, writing in The New York Review of Books, said: "Of literary sleights of hand none is more exhilarating for the writer, as none is likely to be riskier, than the appropriation of another—classic—writer's voice." In the Globe and Mail, reviewer William Kowalski wrote: "I had hoped that there was someone like Dickinson out there. My one regret, after finding her, was that I would never get to make her acquaintance. No doubt millions of others feel the same. It's for us that Jerome Charyn has written this book."
In The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, Charyn attempts to bring America's greatest female poet to life by transforming himself into Emily Dickinson. Assuming her voice, he narrates Dickinson's "secret life" to the reader, delving into her childhood, romantic involvements, even her final illness and death.
On May 1, 2011, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson was named a "Must-Read" book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book and selected as finalist for its annual book award in the fiction category. The French edition of his novel, titled la vie secrète d'emily dickinson, was released by Rivages in 2013,
Charyn says he drew inspiration for his novel from Emily Dickinson's letters and poems. He sayd of Dickinson: "I am fascinated by her writing and the kind of power she had. Where it came from, I don't think we'll ever know."

"The Collagists"

In 2007 Charyn was asked by the literary website Smyles and Fish, along with lifelong friend, novelist Frederic Tuten, to write an essay about their former colleague and friend Donald Barthelme. The project evolved into a lengthy article, which offers a sort of collage of these three writers and the world of their influences. The work is divided into three parts - an introductory essay on the project by editor-in-chief Iris Smyles, Charyn's essay on Barthelme, and Tuten's piece My Autobiography: Portable with Images. The work also features photos of the three writers and their work, as well as quotes from Barthelme himself.

Advocacy and charity work

In 1968, Charyn joined Noam Chomsky, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Thomas Pynchon, Henry Miller, James Baldwin and more than 400 others in signing the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Personal life

Charyn has lived in Greenwich Village, the Bronx, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, California, Houston, Austin, Texas, Paris and Barcelona. He currently divides his time between New York and Paris. During 14 years living in Paris and teaching at the American University, he resisted mastering the French language, fearful of its effect on "the rhythm , even though French words creep into your vocabulary. I don't want my music interfered with."
Charyn is married to Lenore Riegel, mother of actress Eden Riegel and voice actor Sam Riegel.

Honors