Alan Isler

Who was Alan Isler?

Alan Isler was an American novelist and professor. He left his native England for the United States at age 18, served in the US Army from 1954 to 1956, received a doctorate in English Literature from Columbia University and taught Renaissance Literature at Queens College, City University of New York from 1967 to 1995. In 1994 he won the National Jewish Book Award and the JQ Wingate Prize for his first novel “The Prince of West End Avenue”, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has subsequently published four other works: “Kraven Images”; “The Bacon Fancier”, also known as “Op.Non.Cit.”,; “Clerical Errors”; and “The Living Proof”.

His writing is dense but comical, referential and intellectual in the tradition of Nabokov, and often concerned with the bitter-sweet condition of the solitary Jew in a Gentile world.

Alan Isler died after a long illness on March 29, 2010.