Donald Antrim
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Writer, New York

Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow in Fiction - Class of Spring 2009

Donald Antrim is a frequent contributor of fiction to the New Yorker and has written a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Verificationist, The Hundred Brothers, which was a finalist for the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction, and Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. He is most recently the author of a memoir called The Afterlife (Picador, 2007). He has received grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He has also taught prose fiction at the graduate school of New York University.

Project Description

Must I Now Read All of Wittgenstein?

Antrim was working on a novel called “Must I Now Read All of Wittgenstein?” Told from the perspective of the son and is loosely based on a project by his own father, H.T. Antrim, entitled “T.S. Eliot’s Concept of Language.” The project will serve as a means for Antrim to explore the nature of his “relationship to my father and his relationship to me, and in this way explore the very act of invention [in the form of writing novels and stories] in as a function of memory, desire, and loss.”

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