He was born in New York City in 1923 and died in 2017. She was a well-known writer throughout her career as the author of children's and youth literature, while her works for the general public received only late notoriety, when in the mid-1990s she was vindicated by such disparate authors as Jonathan Frazen and David Foster Wallace. She is the author of two memoirs, a book of short stories and six novels, among which are Pobre George (1967), The Sons of the Widow (1976) and Desperate Characters (1970), considered today one of the essential classics of American literature of the twentieth century.