Jamie M. Saul

I was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, attended public school there, and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, an all-boys school, at the time, with renowned alumni that includes Richard Avedon, the great photographer; novelist James Baldwin; playwrights and screenwriters Paddy Chayefsky and Neil Simon; and several famous actors, film directors, and athletes. I received my bachelors degree in English from Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana. For most my life, all I wanted to do, which is to say the only thing I wanted to be, was a writer, and all my energies were directed toward that goal. Most everything else about me that is pertinent can be found in the P.S. material at the back of the Harper Perennial edition of my novel Light of Day. I can add that my life has been and still is fairly unremarkable. I have very little in common with the characters of Light of Day. I don't have any children. I have never been divorced nor abandoned by a wife, and except for being a guest professor at Yale, I've never held a position with a college or university. I will say that I have a dislike of facile thinking; one's mind should always stay open and remain keen to change and new ideas. To quote e.e. cummings "…even if it's Sunday, may i be wrong." I have a deep love for baseball, and enjoy American and foreign films. This interest in film began the first time I saw Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) a dazzling film directed by Jacque Demy, with music by Michel Legrand, and starring a young Catherine Deneuve. Since then, I have discovered and enjoyed the works of some of the great filmmakers, including Jean-Luc Goddard, Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Federico Fellini, Roman Polanksi, Ingmar Bergman, Billy Wilder, Alan Rudolph (get your hands on The Moderns for a visual treat), the Coen Brothers, and who am I leaving out? Stanley Kubrick, Bernardo Bertolucci, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Akira Kurosawa, Woody Allen, Martin Scorcese… My interest in art and artists also began around the time I discovered foreign cinema, and the artists I admire are also mentioned in my P.S. material, but I will add that along with Paul Cézanne, I consider Marcel Duchamp among the most important artists and thinkers of the modern era.