Daughter of American diplomats, Helen DeWitt was born in a suburb of Washington, DC and grew up mainly in Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador). She gets hit up for donations/invited to reunions by: Colegio Bolivar (Cali); Colegio Americano de Guayaquil; Northfield Mt Hermon; Smith College; Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; Brasenose College, Oxford. GHS (the eponymous high school of the town that is home to the Fighting Gators) is missing a trick, as are others too numerous to encourage.
She has a BA (and, indeed, Oxford MA) in Literae Humaniores and a D.Phil. in Greek and Latin Literature. Editors of previous bios have liked the 15-odd languages and the varied work history; conversion to Judaism (1985), UK naturalisation (1999) and late onset lesbianism have been seen as TMI. Roland Barthes does say that an author’s life can’t be written by the author.
Her first novel, The Last Samurai, was published to international acclaim in 2000, reissued by New Directions in 2016; a second novel, Lightning Rods, was published after many vicissitudes in 2011; a collection of stories, Some Trick, was published in 2018; and a novella, The English Understand Wool, was published in 2022.
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