On this date in 1961, novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz was born in New York City to Ann and Burton Korelitz. She was raised in “an extremely progressive environment” by her Jewish parents. Her physician father specialized in gastroenterology and her mother was a therapist. Korelitz describes herself as “a lifelong atheist, but deeply tortured by ethical guilt and moral compulsion.” (The Guardian, July 23, 2021)
Korelitz credits her “love of psychopaths” to her mother, with whom she would “dissect” clients’ stories over the dinner table: “She had a vested interest in indoctrinating my sister and me with this information because she wanted us not to fall prey to the devastating charm of these people.” (Ibid.)
Life-changing for her was “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths” (1962): “The book that made me an atheist at the age of eight, while filling me with a passion for stories and art.” Her favorite book as a child was “anything involving a horse,” and the closing lines of Anna Sewell’s “Black Beauty” (1877) captured her imagination. (Shelf Awareness, Feb. 24, 2014)
After graduating from the private Fieldston School (started by Felix Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture movement), she earned an English degree from Dartmouth College and a master’s in English from Clare College in Cambridge, England. Her first novels — “A Jury of Her Peers” (1996) and “The Sabbathday River” (1999) — were filled with legal intrigue.
Novels that followed: “The White Rose” (2006), “Admission” (2009, with a 2013 film adaptation starring Tina Fey), “You Should Have Known” (2014, with a 2020 HBO film titled “The Undoing” with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant), “The Devil and Webster” (2017), “The Plot” (2021), “The Latecomer” (2022) and “The Sequel” (to “The Plot,” 2024).
Korelitz and Irish poet Paul Muldoon were married by a rabbi in 1987 at her parents’ home in South Salem, N.Y., and have a daughter, Dorothy (b. 1992) and a son, Asher (b. 1999). Muldoon won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and has taught since 1987 at Princeton University.
Korelitz and her sister Nina in 2015 co-produced “The Dead, 1904,” an immersive theater adaptation of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” Korelitz and Muldoon adapted the story for performance Off-Broadway by the Irish Repertory Theatre.
While long an open atheist, she is fascinated by religion, and Mormonism perhaps most of all. (For proof, watch her 15-minute “riff and rumination” on the House of SpeakEasy’s “Seriously Entertaining” series in 2023): “I can’t speak for all atheists but this one is fascinated by other people’s religious faith. … I think that’s because even though I’m pretty sure I’m right and I think we should all be atheists, part of me still believes that if you believe you are better than I am, and I can’t really explain that, but it means that even terrible people who I could name who are maybe in Congress right now, who are religious believers and who do terrible, terrible things are somehow better than I am because they have made this bargain with the unknown.”
PHOTO: Korelitz at the 2014 Texas Book Festival in Austin; photo by Larry D. Moore, CC 4.0.
