Alan Furst Biography

Alan Furst was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. An only child with older parents he wandered alone or with friends around New York and learned to love the city and its people. He attended Oberlin College mistakenly majoring in English too late discovering anthropology the proper major for a writer. After graduating he drove a taxi in New York and wrote poetry eventually finding work as a teaching assistant in English at the Pennsylvania State University which led to an MA a never-to-be-finished PhD and a Fulbright teaching fellowship at the Université de Montpellier in southern France.
Returning to America he went to Seattle wanting to be away from the East Coast. In Seattle he wrote copy for ad agencies a well-paid freelancer supported by creative directors who liked his first novel Your Day in the Barrel published by Atheneum—a book by a writer who wrote well but had nothing to write about so he wrote a murder mystery. Three more novels followed one worse than the last—two mysteries and a contemporary spy novel.
Moving to Bainbridge Island he began to write for magazines Esquire in particular political travel pieces that foreshadowed his novels of Europe in the 1930s. Wanting to change everything he moved full-time to Paris (and remained there for seven years) writing Night Soldiers his first historical espionage novel which was published by Houghton Mifflin. Publishers Weekly said of it

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