Helen DeWitt

Helen DeWitt was born to American diplomats and grew up in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. She obtained a doctorate in Greek and Latin literature from Oxford before beginning work on her novel The Last Samurai. Editors considering DeWitt’s manuscript for publication complained that there was too much Greek and Japanese. The narrator, a single mother raising her child the way John Stuart Mill’s father raised him, comes “close to solipsistic madness,” James Wood wrote in 2018, with “a mind running at a higher temperature than ours.” DeWitt’s other books include the novel Lightning Rods and the short-story collection Some Trick.