From 2000 until 2002, he was the weekly book critic for New York magazine, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing in 2001. Since 2000, he has been a frequent contributor of book, film, and theater reviews to The New York Review of Books; for the latter, he was awarded the 2002 George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism. His book reviews and essays on literary topics appear as well in The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, and he is also a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure.
Mr. Mendelsohn is the author of three books: a memoir of family history and sexual identity, "The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity" (Knopf 1999; Vintage 2000); a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, "Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays" (Oxford University Press, 20002; paperback, Oxford University Press, 2005); and the award-winning international bestseller "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," about his world-wide search for information about the fates of six relatives who perished in the Holocaust.
Daniel Mendelsohn's essays and criticism have been widely anthologized in a number of collections including "The Best American Travel Writing," "The Mrs. Dalloway Reader," "Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca," and (for “Republicans Can Be Cured!”, his satirical New York Times Op-Ed piece about the discovery of a gene for political conservatism) "Best American Humor." In addition to his other honors, Mr. Mendelsohn is the recipient of a 2005 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
From 1994 to 2002, Mr. Mendelsohn was a Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Princeton University; he is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, where each semester he teaches one course on a literary subject. He has been a Writer-in-Residence at the Onassis Center at New York University (1995-6) and a Seeger Fellow in Modern Greek Studies at Princeton University (1999). In April, 2008 he was the Richard Holbrooke Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin. In January 2009, he will be a Critic in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.
He divides his time among homes in New York City, the Hudson Vallley, and New Jersey, where his family live.
Those interested in the photography and/or blog of Matt Mendelsohn, please go to: www.mattmendelsohn.com.
