Michael J. Arlen

Michael John Arlen was born on December 9, 1930, in London,^[1] the son of a British-Armenian writer, Michael Arlen, and former Countess Atalanta Mercati of Athens, Greece. His early childhood was spent with his family in Cannes, in the South of France.^[2] At the outbreak of World War II, he was at boarding school in England and went with his school to join a Canadian school in Ottawa, Canada.^[3] Later he transferred to St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire,^[4] after which he went to Harvard College, where he was a co-President of The Harvard Lampoon and graduated in 1952.^[5]

Arlen worked as a reporter on Life for five years, from 1952 to 1957,^[6] before joining the staff of The New Yorker in 1957 where he remained until 1990. His first book was Living-Room War, a collection of his television pieces centered on the Vietnam War.^[7] The book's title, a term Arlen coined, has gone on to be heavily referenced in academic and journalistic writing.^[8] His two best-known books are Exiles (focused on his childhood in the South of France)^[9] and Passage to Ararat (about his Armenian heritage),^[10] both of them personal histories that first appeared in full in The New Yorker.

Exiles was short-listed for the National Book Award. Passage to Ararat won the National Book Award (Contemporary Affairs) in 1976.^[11]

Arlen has four children from his first marriage. He married a second time, to screenwriter Alice Albright, in 1972, and together they raised an extended family of seven children. Alice Albright Arlen died in 2016.^[12]

• Living-Room War (1969)
• An American Verdict (1974)
• Exiles (1970)
• Passage to Ararat (1975) — National Book Award, Contemporary Affairs
• The View from Highway 1 (1976)
• Thirty Seconds (1980)
• The Camera Age (1981)
• Say Goodbye to Sam (1984)
• The Huntress (2016)