Born in Amsterdam in 1921 to Elisabeth van Collem (daughter of socialist poet
Abraham Eliazer van Collem) and David Königsberger, he was educated at the
University of Amsterdam 1939-41, the
University of Zurich 1941-43, and the
Sorbonne in 1946. Escaping the occupied Netherlands with the
Resistance (he was a wearer of the Dutch Resistance Cross), he was one of the youngest sergeants in the British Army, 7 Troop, 4 Commando, working as an interpreter during the allied occupation of Germany at the end of the war. As an editor of
De Groene Amsterdammer, a Dutch weekly, 1947–50, he was invited to run a cultural program on Radio Jakarta, Indonesia which he did from 1950-51. It was after this that he came by freighter to the United States. His first novel,
The Affair, was published in 1958. He also began writing non-fiction, including several travel books, including
Love and Hate in China (1966). During the
Vietnam War he turned his attention to protest, helping to found the still-active '
RESIST' organization in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, with
Noam Chomsky among others. He was also a creative writing professor at Boston University between 1971-72. For the next thirty years he wrote fiction and non-fiction and was a two-time recipient of a
National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for creative writers, for fiction. Four of his novels were made into films:
A Walk with Love and Death, which was
Anjelica Huston's first film, directed by her father,
John Huston;
The Revolutionary, starring
Jon Voight;
Death of a Schoolboy, for BBC London, and
The Petersburg-Cannes Express. From 2000 to 2006 he also found time to run
Literary Discord, a radio program broadcast by
WPKN Bridgeport, dedicated to discussing such literature and the state of publishing in the United States. He interviewed, among many others,
Russell Banks and Sadi Ranson about the state of publishing in the United States. His archive is held at Boston University. == Fiction ==