It’s the birthday of Australian author Thomas Keneally (b. 1935), who has written over 40 novels and a slew of nonfiction books but is best known for Schindler’s Ark (1982), which Spielberg made into the film Schindler’s List (1993). Schindler’s Ark won the Booker Prize for Fiction, which created some controversy, as some critics said it shouldn’t count as fiction. Discuss.

Keneally was born in Sydney, Australia, to an Irish Catholic family but raised in New South Wales until the family moved to Sydney. Keneally entered a Catholic seminary to study for the priesthood but left without being ordained and later married and had two kids, so that worked out. He taught school for a while, but his early fiction was informed by his seminary experiences and Catholicism. His first novel, The Place at Whitton (1964), is a crime novel set in a monastery and sounds like a real blood bath, with priests being murdered left and right… His fourth novel, Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968), is much less bloody and features a great priest with honest doubts; hijinks ensue. (That’s an exaggeration, but the novel is comic.)

In 1980, Keneally was shopping for a briefcase in Beverly Hills. He ended up in a high-end shop owned by a man named Leopold Page, real name Pfefferberg, and while waiting for Keneally’s Australian credit card to go through, Pfefferberg tells Keneally how he and his wife Mischa were saved from the German death camps by a Nazi named Oskar Schindler. Pfefferberg had files of documents and photos, which he shared with Keneally, hoping to convince him to write what he called “the greatest story of humanity man to man,” and among the documents was a list of all the people Schindler saved. Keneally, at first feeling ill-qualified to write the story since he wasn’t Jewish, was eventually persuaded to do so, seeing that “If one looked at the Holocaust using Schindler as the lens, one got an idea of the whole machinery at work on an intimate level, and of how that machinery had its impact on people with names and faces.” Read Keneally’s whole account of his first meeting with Pfefferberg here.

Keneally’s latest novel, Two Old Men Dying, came out in 2018, though he’s also co-authored a historical crime series with his daughter Meg Keneally, and the latest of those, The Ink Stain, came out in 2019.

Have a fantastic Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.