The first full-length study of Children of Herakles and Suppliant Women to appear in fifty years, Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays uses fresh insights into the Greek conception of gender and the Athenian ideology of civic identity to demonstrate at last the formal elegance and intellectual complexity of two works that are still dismissed as artistic failures within the poet's oeuvre.
Daniel Mendelsohn was born on Long Island in 1960 and was educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton, where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. After completing his Ph.D. in Classics in 1994, he began a career in journalism in New York City, and since then his articles, essays, reviews and translations have appeared frequently in numerous national publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, Newsweek, The New York Review of Books, and Travel + Leisure, where he is a contributing editor. From 2000 until 2002, he was the weekly book critic for New York magazine, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism. Mr. Mendelsohn's other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Dramatic Criticism.
His first book, "The Elusive Embrace," published by Knopf in 1999, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. In 2002, he published a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, "Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays." In 2006 Mr. Mendelsohn's international bestseller "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," was published in the United States to extraordinary critical acclaim. A New York Times Notable Book of 2006 and a 'Best of the Year' pick in a dozen other newspapers, The Lost won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Salon Book Award, and a number of other honors; in its foreign translations it has been awarded the Prix Médicis (France), the ADEI-WIZO Prize (Italy) and was short-listed for the Duff Cooper Prize (UK). With now over half a million copies in print, it has been translated into a dozen other languages for publication throughout Europe and in Israel.
In August, 2008 a collection of Mr. Mendelsohn's critical essays about books, theater, and film, entitled "How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken," most of them from the New York Review of Books, was published by HarperCollins, and was subsequently named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2008. In April 2009, his two-volume translation, with commentary, of the complete works of Constantine Cavafy, including the first-ever translation of the poet's "Unfinished Poems", was published by Alfred A. Knopf and immediately hailed as "extraordinary" (The New Yorker), "the definitive Cavafy for some time to come" (Publishers Weekly), and "a work of art in its own right" (The New York Times Book Review). He currently working on a new book, "Odysseys: Adventures in Reading the Greeks," to be published in 2012.
Mr. Mendelsohn divides his time between homes in New York City and in New Jersey, where his family live.
