Robert Kanigel

My latest book, just published, is a memoir, YOUNG MAN, MUDDLED; learn more about it on its own page.

 

The book I'm working on now, tentatively titled TESSERAE, or maybe THE ANTIOCH MOSAICS [write to me at kanigel@mit.edu if you have a preference], is about excavations of the ancient city of Antioch in the 1930s that unexpectedly yielded an unparalleled treasure of stunning mosaics from the early years of our era.  

 

A little ways back, but not much -- it was published by Knopf in April 2021 -- is a literary adventure story about a classics scholar who in the 1920s overturned long-prevailing ideas about the origins of the Odyssey and the Iliad. It takes readers to Paris, Yugoslavia, and Harvard, as well as to the San Francisco Bay Area, where our hero grew up. And to Los Angeles, where he died of a gunshot wound at age 33.  It's entitled HEARING HOMER'S SONG: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry. 

 

The book before that, published by Knopf in September 2016, was a biography of Jane Jacobs, the fearless activist, author and champion of big-city life. It's called EYES ON THE STREET: The Life of Jane Jacobs.

 

Since the 1980s, I've been writing books, sometimes on quirky topics, like leather and its inspired imitators; that was the subject of my book FAUX REAL. My 2012 book, ON AN IRISH ISLAND, took me to a windswept island village off the coast of Ireland, the setting for a story of love and friendship, literature and language, in the early years of the twentieth century.

 

I've also written books about the French Riviera; Frederick Winslow Taylor, the first efficiency expert; mentor relationships among elite scientists; and about the Indian mathematician Ramanujan; that book, THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY, has been translated into more than a dozen languages and was made into a 2015 film starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons.

 

Before I started writing books in the 1980s, I wrote magazine articles, essays, and reviews.  But once I started with books I couldn't get enough of them -- big, meaty projects that take me into new intellectual, geographic, and human realms and demand my best energies for the four or five years it takes to research and write them.

 

In 2011, after twelve years as a professor at MIT, I returned to Baltimore where I've spent most of my adult life and where I write full-time.