James Stern

The son of a British cavalry officer of Jewish descent and an Anglo-Irish Protestant mother, Stern was born in County Meath, Ireland. After working in Southern Rhodesia as a young man, he worked for his family's bank in London and Germany, which he loathed. He escaped to Paris, where he met his German wife Tania Kurella, whom he married in 1935. Together, they collaborated on many translations from German. They moved to New York in 1939, returned to England in the early 1950s and in 1961 moved to Hatch Manor, in Wiltshire. Stern's fiction includes The Heartless Land (1932), Something Wrong (1938), The Man who was Loved (1952), and The Stories of James Stern (1969). The Hidden Damage (1947), his most frequently re-printed book, is his account of his work in Germany with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945, where he served along with W.H. Auden. Among his friends and correspondents were Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, and Arthur Miller, whose A View from the Bridge was dedicated to him.