Mark Helprin
Google the name of nationally renowned author Mark Helprin, and an ample list of 47,400 hits flashes onto the screen. But instead of reading about him online, Hillsdale students and faculty will be able to enjoy his company in person as he lectures and teaches on campus during the next two weeks.
At 9 tonight, Helprin will deliver a lecture titled “By Starlight Undiminished: Nature and the Origins of the Founding.” He said he will reveal an unusual secret he learned in the Charleston airport.
“I don't know if anyone has ever taken this approach,” he said. “I'm an essayist. I don't have to prove anything, just suggest [it] ... I suspect no one will agree with it.”
Assistant Provost David Whalen described Helprin as “generous, funny, and unpretentious. You can see where the delight of being comes from in his novels, because it is in him.”
During his stay at Hillsdale, Helprin will share his experience with students by teaching one seminar class on creative writing and one on strategic assessment, two subjects in which he has extensive background.
Helprin said he'd never specifically call his writing seminar creative writing, but the writing of fiction and short stories, noting that he will be teaching “what is not always done in fiction writing.”
He described his strategic assessment seminar as instruction in logical thought by educating on the role of the unconscious.
“Military assessment has to be done in the subconscious to master it,” he said.
Sophomore Dave Talbot said: “After having had one [class] session I'm extremely glad that I signed up for this course. It's an intense course. He teaches by the Socratic Method, so he calls students out by name–asks them questions by name–which makes for a pretty intense atmosphere. He's trying to replicate to a degree the stress and intensity involved in high level strategic assessment.”
Helprin's instruction on war is a product of his own experience. According to the Claremont Institute where Helprin is a senior fellow, he was a member of the British Merchant Navy, the Israeli Infantry and the Israeli Air Force, and he holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard. He did postgraduate work at Oxford as well.
In an interview in the Paris Review , Helprin explained his interests.
“I've always said, for example, that the best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation–a fire, an earthquake, a flood, a battle–and that I would rather go to war than to a cocktail party,” he said.
Helprin is an accomplished novelist and has written 530 published essays. His journalistic work has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly , The New Criterion , National Review , The American Heritage , The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times .
Whalen said Helprin's “ability to write an epic narrative that rises to the level of a lyric is almost unmatched,” adding that, “He has a keen eye for the bizarre, the particular, the aesthetically compelling, and he manages to tell stories that illuminate experience while not giving up an inch of whimsy and realism.”
Immediately after tonight's lecture, Helprin will be at a reception in Dow rooms A and B where he will be available to talk with students personally.
Collegian Freelancer Jon Fisher contributed to this article.