Leslie Epstein

Leslie Epstein was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Hollywood. He attended the Webb School of California, and went to Yale University for his bachelor's in English in 1960 and later returned for an earned Doctor of Fine Arts in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama in 1967. In 1960 he matriculated at Merton College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship; he attained a Diploma in Social Anthropology in 1962. He then returned to the United States and received a master's in theatre arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1963.

Epstein wrote nine novels including King of the Jews (1979), Pandaemonium (1997), and San Remo Drive: A Novel from Memory (2004). His last novels are The Eighth Wonder of the World, published by Other Press in 2006, and Liebestod: Opera Buffa with Lieb Goldkorn, published by W. W. Norton & Co. in February 2012. Epstein wrote articles for Esquire, the Atlantic, Playboy, Harper's, the Yale Review, the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. He served as director of the Boston University Creative Writing Program for more than thirty years. Epstein died at the age of eighty-seven on May 18, 2025.