Leslie Epstein was born in Los Angeles to a family of film makers —his father and uncle co-wrote dozens of films including The Man who Came to Dinner, Arsenic and Old Lace, Strawberry Blonde, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca—and films make up much of the subject matter of his fiction. He earned an undergraduate degree at Yale and a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. He is the author of Hill of Beans: A Novel of War and Celluloid, P.D. Kimerakov, The Steinway Quintet Plus Four, Regina, GOLDKORN TALES, Pinto and Sons, Pandaemonium, Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail, San Remo Drive, and The Eighth Wonder of the World. His novel King of the Jews, a classic of Holocaust Fiction, was published in eleven foreign languages; his stage adaptation was produced by the Huntington Theatre Company and the Olney Theatre. He's received Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, an award for Distinction in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a residency at the Rockefeller Institute at Bellagio, and grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University for over thirty years, he currently teaches fiction.