13 Facts About Tom Reiss

Tom Reiss was born on May 5,1964 and is an American author, historian, and journalist.

Tom Reiss is the author of three nonfiction books, the latest of which is The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, which received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Tom Reiss was born on May 5,1964, in New York City, to Jewish parents.

Tom Reiss spent his first years of his life in Washington Heights in Manhattan and then in San Antonio and Dallas, Texas, where his father worked as an Air Force neurosurgeon.

Tom Reiss attended the Hotchkiss School and then Harvard College, where he joined the writing and editing staffs of The Harvard Crimson newspaper and The Harvard Advocate magazine, graduating in 1987.

In 1989, Tom Reiss returned to Texas to study creative writing at the University of Houston, under the guidance of professor Donald Barthelme.

When Barthelme died in summer 1989, Tom Reiss left Texas and traveled to Germany in order to begin researching his family history, and became fascinated by the rapidly changing political and social context in East Germany after the Berlin Wall fell.

Tom Reiss used his German to better understand members of his family, who had escaped Nazi Europe in the 1930s.

Tom Reiss was influenced by various jobs he held, such as hospital orderly, bartender, small business entrepreneur, teacher, and, in Japan, rock band member and actor in television commercials and gangster films.

Tom Reiss co-wrote the English version of Ingo Hasselbach's memoir Fuhrer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Nazi, published in 1996 by Random House.

In 2005, Tom Reiss published The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life.

In 1937, according to Tom Reiss, he published the classic novel Ali and Nino: A Love Story, under the pseudonym "Kurban Said".

Tom Reiss traveled to ten countries to research the book, which details not only Nussimbaum's life, but extensive local and historical background of the times, and Tom Reiss's search to find and piece together Nussimbaum's biographical details.