Dan Hofstadter was educated at Columbia University and the
Sorbonne, to which he received a French scholarship. He has
contributed to many national journals, including Smithsonian, the
Wall Street Journal, and the New Yorker, serving as a contract
writer for the latter for eight years. He is the author of five
works of nonfiction. The Love Affair as a Work of Art (1996) was
nominated for a Book Critics Circle Award; Falling Palace (2005)
was nominated for an American PEN Award.
“Hofstadter is writing on the basis of firsthand acquaintance; most
of his subjects could also be called his friends. This gives him an
authority which many writers lack, yet at the same time there’s no
sense that he’s addressing a self-satisfied coterie. His prose is
at once exceptionally knowledgeable and jargon-free. As Hofstadter
himself notes in the preface, Temperaments isn’t a
collection of art criticism. He writes about art a great deal, and
with contagious enthusiasm, but finally he’s practicing a kind of
biography. Hofstadter is gifted with curiosity, inexhaustible
interest in the trivial yet luminous details that make his subjects
vividly present to the reader. He’s a storyteller, too; each
chapter is a self-contained narrative, replete with strange twists
of fate and hidden harmonies.” —Magill Book Reviews
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