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Ellen Feldman

Biography

Ellen Feldman

Ellen Feldman, a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of THE LIVING AND THE LOST (winner of Long Island Reads award), PARIS NEVER LEAVES YOU (translated into 13 languages), TERRIBLE VIRTUE (optioned by Black Bicycle for a feature film), THE UNWITTING, NEXT TO LOVE, SCOTTSBORO (shortlisted for the Orange Prize), THE BOY WHO LOVED ANNE FRANK (a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice”), LUCY and THE TROUBLE WITH YOU.

Ellen has lectured extensively around the country and in Germany and England, and enjoys talking to book groups in person or via the web.

She grew up in northern New Jersey and attended Bryn Mawr College, from which she holds a B.A. and an M.A. in modern history. After further graduate studies at Columbia University, she worked for a New York publishing house.

Ellen lives in New York City and East Hampton, New York, with her husband and a terrier named Charlie.

Ellen Feldman

Books by Ellen Feldman

by Ellen Feldman - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Raised never to step out of bounds, educated in one of the Sister Seven Colleges for a career as a wife and mother, torn between her cousin, Mimi, who is determined to keep her a “nice girl” --- the kind that marries a doctor --- and her aunt Rose, who has a rebellious past of her own, Fanny struggles to raise her young daughter and forge a new life by sheer will and pluck. When she gets a job as a secretary to the “queen” of radio serials --- never to be referred to as soaps --- she discovers she likes working. Through her friendship with an actress who stars in the series and a man who writes them, she comes face to face with the blacklist, which is destroying careers and wrecking lives. Ultimately, Fanny must decide between playing it safe or doing what she knows is right.

by Ellen Feldman - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Millie (Meike) Mosbach and her brother, David, manage to escape to the States just before Kristallnacht, leaving their parents and little sister in Berlin. Millie attends Bryn Mawr on a special scholarship for non-Aryan German girls and graduates to a magazine job in Philadelphia. David enlists in the army and is eventually posted to the top-secret Camp Ritchie in Maryland, which trains German-speaking men for intelligence work. Now they are both back in their former hometown, haunted by ghosts and hoping against hope to find their family.

by Ellen Feldman - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Living through World War II, working in a Paris bookstore with her young daughter, Vivi, and fighting for her life, Charlotte is no victim. She is a survivor. But can she survive the next chapter of her life? Alternating between wartime Paris and 1950s New York publishing, Ellen Feldman's PARIS NEVER LEAVES YOU is an extraordinary story of resilience, love and impossible choices, exploring how survival never comes without a cost.

by Ellen Feldman - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Trained as a nurse, Margaret Sanger fought for social justice beside labor organizers, anarchists, socialists and other progressives, eventually channeling her energy to one singular cause: legalizing contraception. From opening the first illegal birth control clinic in America in 1916 through the founding of Planned Parenthood to the arrival of the Pill in the 1960s, Sanger sacrificed two husbands, three children and scores of lovers in her fight for sexual equality and freedom.

by Ellen Feldman - Crime, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery

On a bright November day in 1963, President Kennedy is shot. That same day, Nell Benjamin receives a phone call with the news that her husband, the influential young editor of a literary magazine, has been murdered. She also receives information that threatens to turn her understanding of her marriage on its head. As the truths Nell discovers about her beloved husband upend the narrative of her life, she must question her own allegiance: to her career as a journalist, to her country, but most of all to the people she loves.

by Ellen Feldman - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In Next to Love by Ellen Feldman, three young women --- Babe, Millie and Grace --- who live in a small town in Massachusetts all send the men they love off to fight in World War II. Not everyone returns, and those who do are profoundly changed, reminding us that the scars of war run deeper than the day that victory is won. This character-rich story begins before the men head out and continues right through the early ’60s.