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 Stefan Kanfer is a contributing editor of City Journal. He writes extensively on a wide range of political, social, and particularly cultural topics. Kanfer's most recent City Journal feature, "A Little Touch of Mozart in New York" (Autumn 2001), recounts the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, an obscure but resilient homme du monde who wrote the libretti to Don Giovanni, Così Fan Tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, traveled across Europe, and whose final resting place lies in Flushing, Queens. Kanfer's previous articles include "Horatio Alger: The Moral of the Story" (Autumn 2000), "Good Literature Lives!"(Spring 2000) and "And on the Right, Charles Dickens!" (Winter 1999). Kanfer is the author of eight books, the two newest focusing on Groucho Marx, the aspiring doctor pushed into show business by his mother, who became one of the world's most conflicted—and most famous—comedians and cultural icons. The first book is a biography, recently purchased by Stephen Spielberg for a biographical film about Marx; the accompanying volume is an anthology of writings by and for the comedian. Kanfer's other nonfiction works include Fear Itself, an account of the last days of the Roosevelt administration; A Journal of the Plague Years, a history of the blacklist in show business; A Summer World, a history of the great Catskills resorts; The Last Empire, a widely praised history of De Beers from its first days in South Africa to its present global dominance; and the recently published Serious Business, a history of animated cartoons in America. Kanfer's novel, The Eighth Sin, about gypsies during World War II, was a selection of the Book of the Month Club and led to an appointment on the President's Commission on the Holocaust. Kanfer is the only journalist ever to serve on that commission. Kanfer wrote and edited at Time for more than 20 years, during which he was a cinema and theater reviewer and essayist, and, for 10 years, Senior Editor of the magazine's book review section. He has written for most major periodicals, serves on the board of the Library of Congress's Civilization magazine, and is the drama critic for The New Leader. Kanfer is the main interviewer in the cinema documentary The Line King, a biography of theatrical caricaturist Al Hirshfield, given an Academy Award nomination in 1998. Before becoming a journalist, Kanfer wrote for the theater and television, contributing material to Victor Borge, Gwen Verdon, and Alan Funt, among others. The recipient of numerous awards, Kanfer was installed as a Literary Lion at the New York Public Library, has been a writer in residence at CUNY and a Visiting Professor at SUNY-Purchase and Wesleyan University, and was the only Time writer to win the Penney-Missouri School of Journalism Prize and the Westchester Writers Prize. Stefan Kanfer lives in New York with his wife May, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. They have two married children, Lili, an early childhood teacher at Yale, and Ethan, a Disney animator.
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