Caleb Carr

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Caleb Carr (born August 2, 1955) is an American novelist and military historian. The son of Lucien Carr, a former UPI editor and a key Beat generation figure, he was born in Manhattan and lived for much of his life on the Lower East Side.^[1] He attended Kenyon College and New York University, earning a B.A. in military and diplomatic history. He is a contributing editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and writes frequently on military and political affairs.

Carr is author of the novels The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness, Casing the Promised Land, Killing Time, The Italian Secretary, and the nonfiction books The Devil Soldier, a biography of 19-century American mercenary Frederick Townsend Ward, and The Lessons of Terror. Many of his novels are set in Victorian times; The Italian Secretary was an authorized Sherlock Holmes mystery.

Carr has written plays and movie screenplays, one of which, Bad Attitudes was made into a TV movie in 1991. He was one of the contributing screenwriters for the film prequel to The Exorcist, released as Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, for which he received a shared story credit. He also received a shared screenplay credit on Exorcist: The Beginning. In television, he appears on the PBS program American Experience as a guest commentator/narrator, such as on the episode of the NYC subway system, "New York Underground".

Carr taught three semesters of military history at Bard College as a Visiting Professor. He was also a close friend and confidant of historian James Chace, with whom he collaborated on America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars.

He currently resides in upstate New York on a farm estate called "Misery Mountain" in the town of Berlin, New York in Rensselaer County. Carr ran as a Democrat for the Rensselaer County Legislature in 2005 but came in 4th of 4 candidates.

[edit] References

^ Purdy, Matthew. "ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE WITH: Caleb Carr; Writing to Flee the Past", The New York Times, May 19, 1994. Accessed November 7, 2007. "CALEB CARR inhabits two New Yorks. There is the New York of 1994, where he lives alone in a somewhat messy Lower East Side walkup."

Link, Alex. "City Limits: Fixing New York in Caleb Carr's The Alienist." CLUES: A Journal of Detection 23.3 (Spring 2005): 31-41.