Daniel Mallory

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Daniel Mallory (* 1979 in New York ), or Dan Mallory for short , is an American author who writes under the pseudonym AJ Finn or AJ Finn.

His debut novel, The Woman in the Window , published in January 2018, was # 1 on the New York Times bestseller list on February 4, 2018 and stayed on the list for 11 weeks. The novel was shortlisted for the British Book Award 2019, is currently being filmed under the same title and is due to hit theaters in October 2020.

Life

family

Daniel Mallory was born into a wealthy American family and raised a Catholic. His father, John Mallory, is married to Pamela Mason Poor. John Mallory was an executive at Bank of America in Charlotte . The couple have four children, in addition to Daniel, one more son, John Mallory Jr. (Jack) and their two daughters Hope and Elizabeth. His maternal grandfather, John Barton Poor, was chairman of RKO General .

education

When he was nine years old, the family moved from Garden City , Long Island to Virginia and then to Charlotte, where he attended the private Charlotte Latin School. He studied English literature at Duke University , published various articles in the university's The Chronicle magazine , studied acting with the director and actor Jeffery West and was active in the university's student theater. In 2001 he graduated from Duke University. Between 2002 and 2004 he studied at Oxford and took courses in 20th century English literature.

Professional career

In 2004 he returned to the USA. His subsequent career in publishing is not complete and can only be partially substantiated with reliable sources. In 2009 he was appointed editor of Sphere Books, part of the Little Brown Group . Mallory quit his job at Little, Brown in August 2012 after recurring absenteeism due to serious illnesses. In 2016, when his book was being prepared for publication, he was an editor at William Morrow , which also published his debut novel.

reception

In 2019, Ian Parker published a lengthy article in the literary magazine The New Yorker , meticulously following the traces of Mallory's life and career and giving interviews with people who have crossed his path.

Parker portrays Mallory as a habitual, possibly pathological, liar. Mallory said several times that his mother and father had died. He himself had a brain tumor, including a tumor on the spinal cord, and his brother had committed suicide. During his time in Oxford in 2002/2004 he held seminars with John Kelly (* 1942) and wrote an essay on Patricia Highsmith , of which there is no printed version. In interviews he states that he did his doctorate in Oxford. He did not write a dissertation at Oxford, allegedly he was interrupted by his mother's cancer. Both mother, father and brother Jack, under whose e-mail account he repeatedly wrote emails to former colleagues, are still alive to date (2020) and do not comment, or only barely, on Mallory's stories. There is also no further doctorate in psychology, which he claims to have obtained at an American university with a dissertation on Munchausen syndrome .

Parker's article received wide coverage in the English-language press. According to James Kidd, a journalist from The National Arts & Culture, Mallory is very much in the tradition of authors who falsified their résumés or decorated them with color.

In a response to Parker's article, Mallory said severe bipolar disorder ( Bipolar-II Disorder ) caused major depression , delusions, morbid obsessions, and memory problems.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert McParland: Bestseller: A Century of America's Favorite Books. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield 2019
  2. ^ New York Times, hardcover, fiction
  3. ↑ Fiction Crime & Thriller Book of the Year , accessed May 31, 2020
  4. ↑ Pamela Poor Is Wedon LI The New York Times, May 11, 1975, accessed May 30, 2020
  5. ↑ a b c d e Ian Parker: A Suspense Novelist's Trail of Deceptions The New Yorker, February 4, 2019, accessed May 30, 2020
  6. ^ Dan Mallory, accessed May 20, 2020
  7. ↑ Dan Mallory: The Play's the Thing for Class Speaker , Duke Today, May 11, 2001, accessed May 30, 2020
  8. ↑ Reflections on my encounter with the charming Dan Mallory New Zealand Listener, February 23, 2019, accessed June 1, 2020
  9. ↑ James Kidd: The con of literature: do fibbers make the best fiction writers? The National arts & culture, March 26, 2019, accessed June 1, 2020
  10. ↑ Quoted from: Alexandra Alter: Similarities in 2 Novels Raise Questions About the Limits of Literary Influence The New York Times, February 14, 2019, accessed June 3, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Mallory, Daniel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mallory, Dan (short form); Finn, AJ (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author
DATE OF BIRTH 1979
PLACE OF BIRTH new York