Caleb Carr (August 2, 1955 – May 23, 2024) was an American military historian and author. Carr was the second of three sons born to Lucien Carr and Francesca Von Hartz.
Carr authored The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness, Casing the Promised Land, The Lessons of Terror, Killing Time, The Devil Soldier, The Italian Secretary, and The Legend of Broken, as well as 'My Beloved Monster', a memoir about his relationship with Masha, his half-wild Siberian Forest Cat. He previously taught military history at Bard College, and worked extensively in film, television, and the theater. His military and political writings appeared in numerous magazines and periodicals, among them The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He lived in upstate New York.
Early years and education Carr was born on August 2, 1955, in Manhattan, one of three sons born to Beat Generation figure Lucien Carr and Francesca von Hartz. Lucien's close circle of friends included William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, whom Lucien had known since his college days. Their frequent presence in the Carr household affected Carr's future career: "They were noisy drunks that were a disruption. They made me determined never to be a fiction writer". This reaffirmed an earlier sentiment in a 1997 interview, where he stated that, as a child, "If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face".
Carr received his primary education from St. Luke's School in Greenwich Village and his secondary education from Friends Seminary, also in downtown New York City. Carr's interest in military history did not help him fit in at Friends Seminary, a Quaker school. He was an excellent student, but he was guilty of pranks like setting off cherry bombs in the school lavatories. When he discovered that his school transcript was marked "Socially Undesirable", he was "stunned". "We had guys in our school who dealt opium and cocaine out of their lockers, and the teacher would take them aside and have conversations". The designation was enough to keep him out of Harvard. He attended Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, from 1973 to 1975 and returned to New York City in 1975 to complete his education at New York University, where, in 1977, he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in military and diplomatic history.Purdy, Matthew. "On the Lower East Side With: Caleb Carr; Writing to Flee the Past" , The New York Times, May 19, 1994. Accessed November 7, 2007. "Caleb Carr inhabits two New Yorks. There is the New York of 1994, where he lives alone in a somewhat messy Lower East Side walkup."
Much of Carr's fiction deals with violence perpetrated by people whose behavior has its origins in childhood abuse. His father, whose famously turbulent childhood ended in a conviction for manslaughter, inflicted physical and emotional abuse upon his wife and children. Caleb remembered being singled out for his father's beatings: "He was enormously threatened by me, from the time I was a child—threatened by my tendency to speak what I perceived. Alcoholics don't tend to like children like that." The physical and verbal abuse fueled by alcohol and rage didn't stop even after Caleb's parents divorced when he was eight. Carr did not learn about his father's crime until he was 18. He recalls being shocked, "but not exactly surprised".
The frequent presence of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs in the Carr home was a "little unnerving". "They could be perfectly nice people one-to-one", Carr told Salon in a 1997 interview. "Kerouac was a very nice man. Allen could be a very nice guy. Burroughs was a little strange for a child. But they weren't children people. You needed to be grown up to be around them if you wanted to not be terrified. What they were up to was not gonna make any child reassured."
After the Carrs' divorce, Kerouac proposed marriage to Caleb's mother, but she turned him down and afterwards married writer John Speicher. Carr's new stepfather was another heavy drinker, and Carr made weekly visits to Lucien. "There was a lot of craziness in the family," Carr remembered, "and a lot of alcoholism among the adults." Speicher had three daughters from a previous marriage, and they and the three Carr brothers bonded, a group that Caleb would label "the dark Brady Bunch". They spent most summers at a house in upstate New York, originally bought by Carr's maternal grandparents, then owned by his mother. "When the adults weren't around it was a place of great solace. When they were, it was a place of great exploration because being in the house too much wasn't an option."
Likewise, when the family was back in New York City, Caleb spent as much time as possible away from their apartment. Among his favorite havens, other than the streets of Manhattan themselves, were the city's movie theaters. He at first preferred classic and then war movies, and became increasingly interested in military history. "Part of it was a desire to find violence that was, in the first place, directed toward some sort of purposeful end, and second, governed by a definable ethical code. And I think it's fairly obvious why I would want to do that", he told New York magazine in 1994.
Career
Early career Carr first went to work for the Council on Foreign Relations after high school as a library assistant, and rose during his college year summers (and a semester off) to research assistant. He also wrote freelance articles on global issues. During this period, he published his first nationally noticed broadside: a long indictment, published on the letters page of The New York Times, of Henry Kissinger's foreign policy. This assisted noted historian and expert on U.S. foreign policy James Chace in helping Carr, after he left New York University, to get a job as a researcher and editorial assistant for the Foreign Affairs Quarterly, where Chace was managing editor.
In 1980, Carr left Foreign Affairs to fine-tune and publish his first novel, Casing the Promised Land, a coming of age story about three young men in New York City. It was dedicated to "Everyone who fed me and to: James Chace". Nearly 20 years after Casing the Promised Land was published, the extreme prices that book dealers were offering for the volume forced Carr to post this "self-criticism" on the book's Amazon.com page: "I am the author of this book. It has a few good scenes, but is essentially 'roman à clef' nonsense that every writer has to get out of his system early on. Do yourself a favor and read anything else I've written (you'll be doing me a favor, too). Forgive the follies of youth" (emphasis in the original).
James Chace brought Carr on to organize and edit his acclaimed book, Endless War, dealing with the crisis in Central America, which Carr then covered as a freelance journalist for the Berkshire Eagle and The New York Times. In 1988 Carr and Chace co-authored America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars, an unprecedented and highly acclaimed study of United States of America's traditional and unequivocal approach to national security, beginning with the nation's founders. From the book: "For more than two centuries, the United States has aspired to a condition of perfect safety from foreign threats. Alarmed by even potential dangers to the nation's security, Americans have forcefully responded to both real and imagined assaults against our own borders as well as against those of foreign nations and provinces whose security we have seen as either strategically or politically linked to our own ... Yet the goal of absolute security has constantly eluded us."
In 1989 he became a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, a position he still held in 1994.
In 1991 Carr published The Devil Soldier: The Story of Frederick Townsend Ward, the American Soldier of Fortune Who Became a God in China, a biography, and the first of his books to receive wide recognition. According to The New York Times, "by marshaling his scholarship well and setting it out as an adventure story, Mr. Carr gives a good picture of the buccaneering milieu of the time, and makes a plausible case for the devil soldier being on the side of the angels."
Carr was also active in Hollywood in the 1980s and '90s as a screenwriter and producer. He wrote one movie for television, Bad Attitudes (1991), but the revision and execution of his script deeply disappointed him.
1990s
Carr returned to New York to begin researching and writing what would prove his breakthrough novel, The Alienist, published in 1994. The book became an international bestseller and has been translated into more than 24 languages. Winner of the 1995 Anthony Award for best first novel (although technically it was his second), the book, set in 1896 New York City follows the exploits of a small band of individuals determined to catch a serial killer. The book was also nominated for the 1995 Bram Stoker award.
Carr's lifelong interest in violence, which initially fed his study of military history, expanded into a study of serial killers with the advent of the Son of Sam murders of 1976–1977. (Once again, this was not a mere fascination with brutality, but with the underlying causes of violence and with people—especially military leaders—who seek to limit killing.) Later, as The Alienist began taking shape in his imagination, Carr immersed himself in the history of the New York City neighborhoods in which he had grown up and biographies of its notable figures of the Nineteenth century. He also sought the counsel, during a series of meetings, with Dr. David Abrahamsen, the psychiatrist who examined David Berkowitz after his capture and "unraveled the mind" of the Son of Sam killer. Carr sold the movie rights for The Alienist to Paramount based on an early draft of the book.
Returning to Hollywood, Carr wrote the pilot for a dystopian vision of the far future, The Osiris Chronicles, for Paramount Television. After a vigorous auction, sale of the broadcast rights went to CBS. Once again, however, the execution of the production was deeply disappointing to Carr, and the show was not picked up. Consulted by Paramount TV as to what could be done to salvage the pilot, Carr told Paramount that, if left to work on his own with the assistant editor, he could produce a new cut of the show for a television movie that would at least be moderately successful, especially abroad. Paramount agreed, and the movie, titled The Warlord: Battle for the Galaxy (1998), did indeed prove a modest success, particularly in foreign markets.
At the same time, he appeared on the History Channel's Jack the Ripper: Phantom of Death (1995) as an expert commentator; additionally he was a guest commentator on PBS's American Experience: New York Underground. He was also a featured commentator in Ric Burns' 1999 documentary New York: A Documentary History. Back in Los Angeles, he performed a page-one rewrite of William Wisher Jr.'s script for a prequel to The Exorcist for Morgan Creek Productions, resulting in a screenplay that attracted the legendary John Frankenheimer to direct, Liam Neeson to star, and the famed cinematographer Vittorio Storaro to shoot. But when Frankenheimer suddenly died and was replaced by Paul Schrader, who insisted on his own version of the script, Neeson abandoned the project and Carr, deeply disillusioned, returned to New York for the last time. He was given partial story credit for the two films eventually produced from the script, Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, although, in a subsequent interview with the LA Weekly, Carr emphasized that the movies bore little to no relation to his story.