Tom Reiss

Tom Reiss

Tom Reiss (born 1964) is an American author and journalist who lives in New York City. He has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Reiss is best known as the author of The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life."

Early life

Reiss was born in 1964 and lived as a very young boy lived in Washington Heights, an area of New York City populated then by mostly German-speaking immigrant families. He grew up in Texas and Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard College. Before becoming a journalist had various jobs including bartender, security guard, actor in Japanese gangster movies, elementary school teacher and producer of industrial videos.

Führer-Ex

Reiss' first major book, was Führer-Ex; Memoirs of a Former Neo-Nazi, published in 1996 by Random House. Written with Ingo Hasselbach, it was the first inside exposé of the European neo-Nazi movement. It first appeared as a 21,000 word excerpt in The New Yorker.

The Orientalist

Reiss is best known as the author of The Orientalist, a biography of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who pretended to be a Muslim while living in Germany during the years leading up to the Holocaust. Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, it tells the story of how Lev Nussimbaum escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan and, as "Essad Bey" and "Kurban Said," became a celebrated adventurer and author of the enduring novel Ali and Nino-–a story of love across ethnic and religious boundaries, published on the eve of the Holocaust–is still in print today.

But Lev’s life grew wilder than his wildest stories. He married an international heiress who had no idea of his true identity–until she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. His closest friend in New York, George Sylvester Viereck – also a friend of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein – was arrested as the leading Nazi agent in the United States. Lev was invited to be Benito Mussolini’s official biographer–until the Fascists discovered his true origins. Under house arrest in the Amalfi cliff town of Positano, Lev wrote his last book–scrawled in tiny print in half a dozen notebooks never before read by anyone–helped by a mysterious half-German salon hostess, an Algerian weapons-smuggler, and the poet Ezra Pound.

Reiss, himself Jewish, was drawn to write The Orientalist, partially based on his own family's experiences in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s in Europe. To research the book he traveled to 10 countries, from Baku to Berlin to Hollywood. He spent five years tracking down secret police records, love letters, diaries, and the deathbed notebooks. Beginning with a yearlong investigation for The New Yorker, Reiss’s quest for the truth buffets him from one weird character to the next: from the last heir of the Ottoman throne to a highly educated baroness living in an Austrian castle who was translating the lyrics of a rock opera from German to French, to an aging starlet in a Hollywood bungalow full of cats and turtles. (Reiss published further details about the bizarre Freudian Nazi, George Sylvester Viereck, in a 2005 "New Yorker" profile of his son, Peter Viereck, who had a rivalry with William F. Buckley over the future of American conservatism.)

The Orientalist appeared on many "top ten" of the year lists and was shortlisted for the 2006 Samuel Johnson Prize for best nonfiction book in the English language. It has been published in 18 other languages and is still appearing in others. It has been declared one of the best books of the year in various countries where it appears.

Dumas biography

Reiss is writing a biography of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the mixed-race son of a Norman marquis and an Haitian slave, who became a swashbuckling swordsman in Paris and then a military hero of the French Revolutionary Wars, remaining the highest-ranking black military figure in a Western army until Gen. Colin Powell 200 years later. His rivalry with Napoleon landed him in a dungeon and led to his early death, but his life inspired his identically named son to write books like “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers.”

External links

• Website for Tom Reiss's book The Orientalist
• Review of "The Orientalist" by the New York Times
• Review of "L'Orientaliste" by the French newspaper Liberation
• Review of "Der Orientalist" by the German news magazine Der Spiegel"
• Review of "L'Orientalista" by Italian newspaper La Republicca
• Article about Tom Reiss in the Norwegian newspaper Der Aftenposten
• "The Story of a Writer who Rewrote his Own Identity" in the Chicago Tribune
• "Was Essad Bey Too Prolific? Did He Really Write All Those Books Published Under His Name? 16 Books in 8 Years," in Azerbaijan International
• "The Vanishing Fascination of Truly Anonymous Authors" in The Guardian
• "Frequently Asked Questions about the Authorship of Ali and Nino" (158 questions, 543 Endnotes), in "The Business of Literature, Who Wrote Azerbaijan's Most Famous Novel: Ali and Nino," in Azerbaijan International, Vol. 15:2-4 (2011).