Tom Reiss - American writer, historian, and journalist
Childhood and adolescence
Tom Reiss was born on May 5, 1964, in New York City, United States of America. He spent the first years of his life in Washington Heights, Manhattan, and then in San Antonio and Dallas, Texas, where his father worked as a neurosurgeon. After that, his family moved to Western Massachusetts, where he spent the rest of his childhood and adolescence in New England. He attended Hotchkiss School, then studied at Harvard, where he already showed his creative abilities, wrote in the student newspaper.
Personal life of the writer
Tom Reiss currently lives in New York. After graduating from Harvard University (located in the United States of America, in the city of Cambridge) in 1987, Reiss changed many different professions of interest, working temporarily as an orderly, performing auxiliary functions in medical practice; a bartender, serving customers at the bar, an entrepreneur (small business), a teacher and, in Japan, a rock band member and actor in TV commercials and gangster films.
In one thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine, he returned to Texas, studied at the US Public Research University - the University of Houston under the guidance of Professor Donald Barthelemy. American postmodernist writer, known for his short stories. One of the largest (along with Pynchon, Bart and Dunleavy) representatives of the American school of black humor. The consummate master of short storytelling. When Donald Barthelemy died in the summer of 1989, Tom Reiss left Texas and went to Germany to begin researching his family history, and was fascinated by the rapidly changing political and social situation in East Germany after the Berlin Wall fell. For effective search of documents and communication with German citizens, I learned German. He also used his German to better understand his family members who fled Nazi Europe in the 1930s. His grandparents were killed by the Nazis after being deported from Paris to the Polish concentration camp Auschwitz, but his mother survived and was hidden as a child in France during World War II. While in Germany, Tom Reiss also interviewed the neo-Nazi youth of East Germany in an attempt to find out why they returned to the political ideals of their ancestors.
Creation
In 1996, Random House, the world's largest and perhaps most famous publishing house in English, published Tom Reiss's Leaders-Ex; Memoirs of Former Neo-Nazi. This publishing house is also a kind of "brand for authors", providing and defending their rights at the highest level, publishing in "Random House" is extremely honorable and beneficial for the author, both beginner and famous. This is the first major book by Tom Reiss, "Memoirs of a Former Neo-Nazi", and is the first in-house exposition of the European neo-Nazi movement.
2005 - Tom Reiss is the author of The Orientalist: Uncovering the Secret of a Strange and Dangerous Life. The biographical novel is dedicated to Lev Nusimbaum, a Baku Jew who converted to Islam, an adventurer and writer who published his books under the pseudonyms Kurban Said and Esad Bey. His main novel, Ali and Nino, a bestseller of the thirties of the last century, experienced a rebirth in the seventies and has been translated into forty languages of the world. However, until the investigation of Tom Riis, the real name of the person who was hiding under the pseudonym Kurban Said on the cover of the book remained unknown. Using the example of one life "full of secrets and dangers", Reiss describes the collapse of the Russian Empire, the fate of emigration in Istanbul and Berlin, the emergence of fascism in Germany, the Great Depression in the United States of America, that is, in fact, he creates his own version of the history of the first half of the twentieth century. The book will be doubly interesting for the Russian reader, since it deals with the painful topic of the national policy of the Russian Empire in the Transcaucasus and gives a fascinating example of the life of a Russian European who has established his own relations with the Muslim world and is accepted by this world as his own.
Two thousand and twelve - Tom Reiss is the author of the biography of General of the Napoleonic army Thomas-Alexander Dumas, the father of the famous writer: "The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo". In this book, Tom Reiss provides an insight into slavery and the life of the mixed race during the French colonial empire. He also recounts how Dumas' son, the writer Alexandre Dumas, looked at his father, who served as the inspiration for some of his novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.
Currently published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker.
Awards
Tom Reiss is a Laureate. For the book "The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo" in 2013 he received the Pulitzer Prize "For Biography or Autobiography."
