Alexander's Feast

Description to come.

Arthur R. G. Solmssen (1928-2018) was born in New York City to Marguerite and Kurt Solmssen, both of prominent German banking families. Two months later they took their new baby home to Berlin, but by 1936 Germany was firmly in the grip of Adolf Hitler, and Arthur's family, which had Jewish ancestry, left to settle in the Philadelphia area. There, starting at the age of eight, he learned English at the Miquon School and Lower Merion High School.At Harvard he reviewed films for the Crimson but took time out for Army service at the end of the Second World War, finally graduating in 1950. After law school at the University of Pennsylvania, he spent his working life at the firm now known as Saul Ewing. Despite his demanding career as a securities lawyer, he made time to write novels, book reviews and op-ed pieces. "I don't play golf, tennis or squash," he explained to the New York Times in 1982, "and I don't play bridge or mow the lawn."Arthur Solmssen's psychological acuity and broad knowledge of the world-gifts of value to attorneys and storytellers alike-were on display in all of his books. But he was at or near the peak of his novelistic powers in Alexander's Feast.