James Kaplan
James Kaplan sold his first short story to The New Yorker at 23, while working in the magazine’s editorial typing pool. After traveling in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States, he taught college in Mississippi and wrote screenplays for Warner Brothers and MGM/UA. He has been writing noted fiction (Best Short Stories of 1978), and magazine journalism about people and ideas in business and popular culture, for over two decades. His essays and reviews, as well as major profiles of such diverse characters as Miles Davis, John Updike, Jack Nicholson, Madonna, Calvin Klein, Jerry Lewis, and Martin Scorsese, have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, and New York. His first novel, Pearl’s Progress, was published by Knopf in 1989. His nonfiction portrait of John F. Kennedy International Airport, The Airport (William Morrow, 1994)_called “a splendid book” by Gay Talese_was reissued in paperback in 1997 by Quill. His second novel, Two Guys From Verona_published in February 1998 by Atlantic Monthly Press, and chosen by The New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year_was published in paperback by Grove Press in April 1999. He lives in Westchester, New York, with his wife and three sons. He is currently writing You Cannot Be Serious, the autobiography of John McEnroe, to be published in spring 2002 by Putnam and Little, Brown UK. He is also at work on a screenplay adaptation of Two Guys From Verona, as well as a new novel.
Favorite writers/literary works:
Bellow/Herzog
Salinger
Hemingway/The Sun Also Rises; stories
Cheever/The Wapshot Chronicle; stories
O’Hara/Appointment in Samarra
Dickens/Bleak House, Great Expectations
Bulgakov/Master and Margarita
Austen/Pride and Prejuice, Mansfield Park
Nabokov/Lolita, Pnin
Mann/Buddenbrooks, Magic Mountain, stories
Favorite sports figures:
Ken Rosewall
Bill Russell
Ben Crenshaw
Billie Jean King
David Cone
Hank Greenberg
Stan Smith
Favorite painters:
Rothko
Diebenkorn
Morandi
de Kooning
Milton Avery
Bonnard
Pisarro
Giorgione
Giotto
