Career[edit]

Epstein was born to an American Jewish family in Los Angeles and grew up in Hollywood.^[2] His father Philip and uncle Julius were both noted screenwriters. Together, they won an Academy Award for the celebrated 1942 film Casablanca.


Epstein attended the Webb School of California, and went to Yale University. In 1960 he matriculated at Merton College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship; he attained a Diploma in Social Anthropology in 1962. He returned to the United States as a graduate student in Theatre Arts at UCLA.^[1]


Epstein has written nine novels including King of the Jews (1979), about Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Judenrat of the Łódź ghetto during World War II; and Pandaemonium (1997). His San Remo Drive: A Novel from Memory (2004) was based on his childhood growing up in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s.


Epstein's most recent novels are The Eighth Wonder of the World, published by Other Press in 2006, and Liebestod: Opera Buffa with Lieb Goldkorn, published by W. W. Norton & Co. in February 2012.


Epstein has written articles for Esquire, The Atlantic, Playboy, Harper's, The Yale Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. Among those articles is his essay, "Returning to Proust's World Stirs Remembrance", for the New York Times series, 'Writers on Writing' (Vol. II). In it, he defined reading Marcel Proust "ala Epstein" as reading Proust each night before bedtime; by confining the session to two pages of five minutes, he created a five-year project to complete all the volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu. His rationale: "It is not a bad idea to keep a nightly appointment with a noble mind; it has the power to purify even the most wasted day."^[3] For more than twenty years, Leslie Epstein has been the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, where he joined the faculty in 1978. In February 2007, his play King of the Jews (not an adaptation of his earlier novel, but an independent realization of the same theme) was premiered at Boston Playwrights' Theatre to critical acclaim.