Jewish Authors

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Listed below is a selection of prominent fiction and nonfiction authors who were, or are, Jewish (or of partial Jewish descent, as noted). For lists of Jewish playwrights, screenwriters, poets, and other Jewish writers, see Jews in Literature.

Shmuel Agnon, The Bridal Canopy; A Guest for the Night, The Day Before Yesterday 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature
Vasily Aksyonov¹, The Burn, Generations of Winter, The Island of Crimea
Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939, The Immortal Bartfuss, The Age of Wonders, The Story of a Life: A Memoir (2004 Prix Médicis étranger)
Sholem Asch, The Nazarine, The Apostle, Three Cities, Salvation, East River
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot, Foundation Trilogy
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy, Leviathan (1993 Prix Médicis étranger)
Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, Odessa Tales
Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Vicki Baum, Grand Hotel
Louis Begley, Wartime Lies (1992 Prix Médicis étranger)
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction); 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature
Henri Bergson, L'Evolution Créatrice (Creative Evolution); 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature
Biblical Authors, The Bible (Jewish and Christian Scriptures)
Robert Bloch, Psycho
Kazimierz Brandys, Samson, Antygona, Troy, Open City, Man Does Not Die
Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil, The Sleepwalkers
Max Brod, The Redemption of Tycho Brahe
Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac (1984 Man Booker Prize)
Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fé, Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power), Das Gewissen der Worte (The Conscience of Words); 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature
Miguel de Cervantes², Don Quixote
Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Hélène Cixous, Inside (Dedans, 1969 Prix Médicis)
Albert Cohen, Belle du Seigneur
Marcia Davenport, The Valley of Decision, Easy Side, West Side
Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, Vivian Grey, Coningsby, Tancred
Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, City of God
Sergei Dovlatov³, The Compromise, The Zone
Maurice Druon⁴, The Accursed Kings (Les Rois Maudits), Les Grandes Familles (1948 Prix Goncourt)
Ilya Ehrenburg,The Ninth Wave, The Storm, The Thaw
Harlan Ellison, Dangerous Visions
Leslie Epstein, King of the Jews: A Novel of the Holocaust, Goldkorn Tales
Edna Ferber, So Big (1925 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel), Show Boat, Cimarron, Saratoga Trunk
Lion Feuchtwanger, Jud Süss (Jew Süss: A Historical Romance), Der jüdische Krieg (Josephus), Der Tag wird kommen (The Day Will Come)
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Civilization and Its Discontents, Totem and Taboo
Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor, In a Strange Room, The Promise (2021 Booker Prize)
Romain Gary ⁵, The Roots of Heaven (1956 Prix Goncourt), The Life Before Us (1975 Prix Goncourt), Forrest of Anger, The Dance of Gengis Cohn
Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey Into the Whirlwind
Natalia Ginzburg⁶, All Our Yesterdays, Voices in the Evening
Nadine Gordimer, A World of Strangers, Burger's Daughter, The Conservationist (1974 Man Booker Prize); 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature
David Grossman, The Yellow Wind, To the End of the Land (2011 Prix Médicis étranger), A Horse Walks into a Bar (2017 Man Booker International Prize)
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, Forever Flowing
Joseph Heller, Catch-22, God Knows (1985 Prix Médicis étranger)
Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War
Stefan Heym, The Crusaders
Paul Heyse⁷, Children of the World, In Paradise; 1910 Nobel Prize in Literature
Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement
Roger Ikor, La greffe de printemps, Les eaux mêlées (1955 Prix Goncourt)
Ilya Ilf, The Twelve Chairs, The Little Golden Calf
Howard Jacobson, Who's Sorry Now?, Kalooki Nights, The Finkler Question (2010 Man Booker Prize)
Elfriede Jelinek⁸, Women as Lovers, Wonderful, Wonderful Times, The Piano Teacher; 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, In Search of Love and Beauty, Heat and Dust (1975 Man Booker Prize)
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying, Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters
Franz Kafka, The Trial, The Castle, Amerika, The Metamorphosis
Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer
MacKinlay Kantor⁹, Long Remember, Andersonville (1956 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Veniamin Kaverin, Two Captains
Imre Kertész, Kaddish for a Child Not Born; 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature
Joseph Kessel, Bell de jour, Les Captifs, Les Coeurs purs (The Pure of Heart), L'Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows)
Danilo Kiš¹⁰, Garden, Ashes, Early Sorrows, Hourglass, The Encyclopedia of the Dead
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, Arrow in the Blue, The Age of Longing, Insight and Outlook, The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation
György Konrád, A Feast in the Garden, Homecoming
Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird, Being There
Judith Krantz, Scruples, Princess Daisy
László Krasznahorkai, Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War, 2015 Man Booker International Prize
Anna Langfus, Les bagages de sable (The Lost Shore) (1962 Prix Goncourt)
Stanislaw Lec, Unkempt Thoughts
Stanislaw Lem, Summa Technologiae, Cyberiad, Solaris
Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, The Periodic Table, If Not Now, When?, The Drowned and the Saved
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil
Jonathan Littell, Les bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) (2006 Prix Goncourt)
Alison Lurie¹¹, Foreign Affairs (1985 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Arnošt Lustig, Night and Hope, Diamonds in the Night, The Street of Lost Brothers, A Prayer for Catherine Horowitz
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, The Armies of the Night (1969 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction), The Executioner's Song (1980 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (1967 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), The Natural, The Tenants, The Assistant
David Malouf ²⁶, An Imaginary Life , Fly Away Peter, The Great World, Remembering Babylon
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope
Norman Manea, On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist, Compulsory Happiness, The Black Envelope, The Hooligan’s Return (2006 Prix Médicis étranger)
Klaus Mann¹², Mephisto, Der Vulkan
André Maurois, Les Silences du Colonel Bramble, À La recherche de Marcel Proust, Climats, Le Cercle de famille, Ariel
Mendele Moykher Sforim, The Little Man, The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost (Les Disparus) (2007 Prix Médicis étranger)
Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse (1975 Prix Médicis étranger), Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Patrick Modiano¹³, Missing Person (1978 Prix Goncourt, 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature)
Michel de Montaigne¹⁴, Essays
Elsa Morante¹⁵, La storia, Aracoeli (1984 Prix Médicis étranger)
Alberto Moravia¹⁶, Two Women, Contempt (alternatively titled A Ghost at Noon), The Conformist
Harry Mulisch¹⁷, The Assault, The Discovery of Heaven, The Procedure
Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel, The End of a Family Story, A Book of Memories
Irène Némirovsky, David Golder, Le Bal, Les mouches d'automne, Le vin de solitude, Les chiens et les loups, Les Biens de ce monde
Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, My Michael
Cynthia Ozick, Art & Ardor, Heir to the Glimmering World, The Puttermesser Papers
Dorothy Parker¹⁸, The Collected Dorothy Parker
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago; 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature
Georges Perec, La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual) (1978 Prix Médicis)
I.L. Peretz, Bontshe the Silent, The Book of Fire: Stories by I.L. Peretz
Belva Plain, Evergreen
Chaim Potok, In the Beginning, The Chosen
Marcel Proust¹⁹, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time; alternatively translated as Remembrance of Things Past) (1919 Prix Goncourt)
Ellery Queen (pseudonym used by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee), Ellery Queen mystery novels, anthologies , and magazine
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living
Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Harold Robbins, The Carpetbaggers
Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep
Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March, Job
Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint, Goodbye Columbus, American Pastoral (1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), The Human Stain (2002 Prix Médicis étranger), 2011 Man Booker International Prize
Bernice Rubens, Madame Sousatzka, The Elected Member (1970 Man Booker Prize), A Solitary Grief
Anatoly Rybakov, Children of the Arbat, Heavy Sand
Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (1978 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction)
J. D. Salinger²⁰, The Catcher in the Rye
Nathalie Sarraute, Tropismes, The Planetarium, The Age of Suspicion, The Golden Fruits, Between Life and Death
Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass
André Schwarz-Bart, Le Dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just) (1959 Prix Goncourt)
Erich Segal, Love Story
Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross
Meir Shalev, The Blue Mountain, Esau, The Loves of Judith
Irwin Shaw, Rich Man, Poor Man, The Young Lions
Sidney Sheldon, The Other Side of Midnight, Rage of Angels
Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and Other Stories, Some Laughter, Some Tears: Tales From the Old World and the New
Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Magician of Lublin, Enemies: A Love Story, Satan in Goray, The Family Moskat, The Slave; 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature
Muriel Spark ²¹, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Manès Sperber, Burned Bramble, All Our Yesterdays
Art Spiegelman, Maus (1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Danielle Steel ²², Best-selling romance novels (more than 500 million copies sold)
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Milton Steinberg, As a Driven Leaf
George Steiner, The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.
Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Lust for Life
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky ²³, Roadside Picnic, Monday Begins on Saturday
Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls
Italo Svevo, The Confessions of Zeno
Alvin Toffler, Future Shock
Yuri Trifonov ²⁴, House on the Enbankment
Elsa Triolet, A Fine of 200 Francs (1944 Prix Goncourt)
Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (1963 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction)
Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent, Burden of Proof, The Laws of Our Fathers, Reversible Errors, Ordinary Heroes
Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Sonechka (1996 Prix Médicis étranger), Kukotsky's Case
Leon Uris, Exodus, Mila 18
Vladimir Voinovich ²⁵, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin
Irving Wallace, The Prize
Edward Wallant, The Pawnbroker, The Human Season
Jerome Weidman, I Can Get It for You Wholesale
Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, The Song of Bernadette
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust, A Cool Million
Elie Wiesel, Night, Dawn, The Accident, The Gates of the Forrest, A Beggar in Jerusalem (Le Mendiant de Jérusalem, 1968 Prix Médicis), All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, And the Sea is Never Full: Memoirs; 1986 Nobel Peace Prize
Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny (1952 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, This is My God
A. B. Yehoshua, A Late Divorce, Five Seasons, Mr. Mani, Spanish Charity (Rétrospective, 2012 Prix Médicis étranger)
Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto
Arnold Zweig, The Case of Sergeant Grischa
Stefan Zweig, Amok, Confusion (alternatively translated as Confusion of Feelings), The Royal Game, The World of Yesterday

NOTES
1. Jewish mother (Eugenia Ginzburg), non-Jewish father.
2. See, e.g., The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, edited by Anthony Cascardi (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p.4). Writing of Cervantes' parents Rodrigo de Cervantes and Leonor de Cortinas, Cascardi states in the Introduction: "While the family may have had some claim to nobility they often found themselves in financial straits. Moreover, they were almost certainly of converso origin, that is, converts to Catholicism of Jewish ancestry."
3. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
4. Jewish father (Lazare Kessel, the brother of novelist Joseph Kessel).
5. Although born Roman Kacew to a Jewish couple, Nina and Leyba Kacew (who separated shortly after his birth), Gary claimed that he "never knew with any certainty who his father was"; see Romain Gary: The Man Who Sold His Shadow, by Ralph Schoolcraft (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2002, pp. 1, 48).
6. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
7. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
8. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
9. Born Benjamin MacKinlay Kantor to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. See My Father's Voice: MacKinlay Kantor Long Remembered, by Tim Kantor (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1988, pp. 28-29, 40, 48-49, 92).
10. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
11. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
12. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
13. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
14. According to both Donald Frame in Montaigne, a biography (Hamilton, London, 1965, pp. 16-28) and Cecil Roth in "The Jewish Ancestry of Michel de Montaigne" [Chapter 14 of Personalities and Events in Jewish History (Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1953, pp. 212-225)], Montaigne's maternal grandfather was a Jewish converso; however, Montaigne's maternal grandmother came from an "Old Christian" (i.e., non-converso) family, as did his father.
15. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
16. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
17. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
18. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
19. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
20. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother; raised Jewish.
21. Jewish father, mother of partial Jewish descent. Although Spark had always maintained that, of her mother's antecedents, only her mother's maternal grandfather was Jewish, documents in the possession of the office of the Chief Rabbi in London indicate that both of her mother's maternal grandparents were Jewish, which is consistent with her grandmother having been buried in the Jewish section of the Piershill Cemetery in Edinburgh. In 1998, Spark conceded that "it's quite possible that Adelaide [her maternal grandmother] was born a Jew, that I got it wrong." See 15 April 1998 article "Document sparks family feud over writer's Jewish origins," by Dean Nelson in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
22. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
23. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother; see final paragraph of http://www.abstrugatskie.ru/strug_famil/.
24. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
25. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
26. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.

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