To become a successful New York lawyer, an icon in international law, is usually enough of a career for one lifetime. Long hours, unexpected crises among clients and few vacations in such a high-stress profession frequently lead firms to award extended vacations to senior partners—intended as a brief reprieve, or at least a welcome change of pace.

For one such lawyer—a former member of the Harvard Advocate, and an English major once as devoted to the drama of Yeats as he would become to the annals of French law—his firm’s sabbatical offered a rare opportunity.

Louis Begley ’54 says he used the first day of his leave to start his first full-length novel. Three months later—the firm offered him the choice of a three- or six-month sabbatical, but Begley preferred the shorter—he had finished a draft.

He published Wartime Lies, the partially autobiographical account of his childhood escape from Nazi-occupied Poland using forged Catholic papers. And the book met international acclaim.

Begley says that he hadn’t written much since his Advocate days, but the sabbatical jump started a second career in literature. He has published seven novels since Lies in 1991, including Mistlers’ Exit, The Man Who Was Late, and About Schmidt—all of which, Begley says, he wrote in the evening hours and over weekends in his country home on Long Island.

“I always gave priority to my legal work,” Begley says. “I only wrote upon weekends and vacation. I worked like a dog.”

His colleagues and friends were not surprised at the intensity with which Begley pursued his long-standing passion.

“He has a restless intellect and you can only channel so much of that into legal work, and he has found a terrific secondary outlet for it,” says George Andreou ’87, Begley’s editor at Alfred A. Knopf. “I don’t have a vision of Louis snoozing in a hammock on Memorial Day weekend.”

Begley’s friends describe him as soft-spoken but constantly alert, and characterized by an observant nature which lends itself to both legal work and fiction writing.

When he was a student at Harvard, Begley didn’t pursue creative writing with full intensity because he felt he had nothing to say; after 45 years as a high-powered international lawyer, he has become an unusually prolific and acclaimed writer of fiction.

FROM WARSAW TO CAMBRIDGE

As a Jew hiding in Nazi-occupied Poland, Begley did not attend school until he was twelve. He says he read constantly and learned Romance languages under the tutelage of his mother and a local university professor.

“I was a somewhat precocious child, and I had been reading...I have always had a book in hand and I spent time reading alone with my mother,” he says. “My mother tried to teach me languages and what she knew, but she had no method.”

Nonetheless, Begley said that he didn’t have much trouble academically once he arrived in the United States.

Begley moved from Europe to Brooklyn, where he attended Erasmus Hall High School. Despite his relative inexperience with English, he won a borough-wide short-story competition. He was admitted to Harvard at age 16, and without having visited the campus, accepted the offer.