About the Author of
THE WHITE ROSE

JEAN HANFF KORELITZ

“Der Rosenkavalier is one of the few works of art that has ever made me laugh AND cry,” says novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. “As a result, my devotion to this opera – and this opera only, since I’m not a devotee of opera in general – has remained constant over the twenty odd years since I first saw it. I would think about it a lot, pull apart the story of the young man who must choose between his aging lover and a young, innocent girl, and wonder how it might translate to the here and now. I began to see ways in which Der Rosenkavalier, with its themes of love, aging, and the passage of time, could be set in Manhattan at the end of the 20th century and THE WHITE ROSE was born.”

THE WHITE ROSE is the third novel by Jean Korelitz. Her first two books were A Jury of Her Peers (Crown; 1996) and The Sabbathday River (Farrar Straus & Giroux; 1999). She is also the author of a collection of poetry, The Properties of Breath, and a children’s novel, Interference Powder.

Jean Hanff Korelitz, 43, grew up in New York City and attended Dartmouth College. She always wanted to be a writer and was first published at age seventeen, when she wrote an article for Seventeen about her cousin Helene Hanff, author of 84, Charing Cross Road. “Until I met her, I was squeamish about my odd middle name,” recalls Korelitz. “Now I’m very, very proud of it. She was the first real writer I ever knew.”

After college, Korelitz spent four years in England and Ireland, first at Cambridge University and later, with her husband, the poet Paul Muldoon, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2003. They moved back to the U.S. in 1987 and now live in Princeton, N.J., where Muldoon is a professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University. In addition to her fiction writing, Korelitz writes for a number of major magazines, including Real Simple, Vogue, Organic Style, and More.

She and her husband have two young children.