Walter Kirn

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Walter Kirn (2014)

Walter Kirn (born August 3, 1962 in Akron , Ohio ) is an American writer.

Life

Walter Kirn came from a small background in the provinces and managed to get a place at Princeton University , where he graduated in 1983. He received a scholarship to continue his studies at Oxford University .

He published his first collection of short stories in 1990 under the title My Hard Bargain . Kirn's essays and reviews have appeared in New York Magazine , The New York Times Book Review , New York Times (Sunday Magazine), The Atlantic, and Time magazine . Kirn is a contributor to The New Republic . He was at times the American correspondent for the BBC . In 2005 he led for a time the blog of Andrew Sullivan . His novel The Unbinding was first published in the online magazine Slate . Two of his novels Thumbsucker (2005) and Up in the Air (2009) were made into films.

Kirn had been friends with the German impostor Christian Gerhartsreiter , alias Clark Rockefeller, for ten years since 1998 , whose alleged Rockefeller relatives impressed him as a social climber. His 2013 book about his relationship with the murderer Gerhartsreiter, who has since been convicted, deals not only with his biography, but also with his invention of social realities, in which Kirn sees himself as a writer.

In an article in Harper's Magazine in June 2016, Kirn opposed the unconditional belief in the predictability of buying and voting behavior; his article was reread after the polls failed to predict the polls in November 2016 .

Works (selection)

  • My Hard Bargain: Stories . Knopf, New York 1990.
  • She needed me . Pocket Books, New York 1992.
  • Thumbsucker: a novel . Broadway Books, New York 1999.
    • Thumb sucker . German by Kristian Lutze. Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 2001.
  • Up in the air . Doubleday, New York 2001.
    • Mr. Bingham is earning miles . From the American. by Henning Ahrens. Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 2003.
  • Mission to America . : Doubleday, New York 2005.
  • The unbinding . Anchor Books, New York 2006.
  • Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever . Doubleday, New York 2009.
  • Blood will out: the true story of a murder, a mystery, and a masquerade . Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York 2013.
    • Blood wants to talk . Translated from the English by Conny Lösch. Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-66768-8 .
  • The Stones, the Crows, the Grass, the Moon . Amazon Original Stories 2018.

Film adaptations

Web links

Commons : Walter Kirn  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Walter Kirn , at The New Republic
  2. ↑ Kirn, Walter , at Slate.com
  3. ↑ Peter Praschl: My friend, the murderer. Walter Kirn wrote a book about the fake Rockefeller who killed two people . ( Memento from January 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) In: Die Welt Kompakt , July 16, 2014.
  4. ↑ Walter Kirn: The Improbability Party , in: Harper's Magazine, June 2016
  5. ↑ Harald Staun: The Victory of Voters Against Their Shadows , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , November 13, 2016, p. 53
personal data
SURNAME Kirn, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author
DATE OF BIRTH 3rd August 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Akron , Ohio